CLP CLP 35 : 1999 "The Case Against The Riverbank: An Indictment in Fourteen Counts." Symposium, Met. Museum, NYC

The Case Against The Riverbank:

An Indictment in Fourteen Counts (version for delivery at Met symposium, Dec. 11 '99)

I want to express my thanks to Wen Fong, Mike Hearn, Judith Smith, and others at the Met. for inviting me to present my views at this gathering. I'm grateful to them especially for their unfailingly friendly and helpful responses to all my requests and problems throughout the long period that led up to this symposium and the publication of my paper. As for Judith, I can only say that if all academic writers had a Judith Smith to work with, the readability level of scholarly writing would be markedly improved.

It feels odd to be standing here delivering a paper for which the audience response has already been determined and published. In a piece that appeared two years ago one of my colleagues wrote: "The Metropolitan museum is planning an international gathering of scholars to examine their promised gift in yet another public forum, and no doubt Cahill will once again present his view. By then, whatever its original shock value may once have been, it will have come now to resemble a miserable, tattered banner, run up the flagpole once again, to be shot full of more holes and ripped apart until, flapping madly and uselessly, it slowly disappears before our eyes." Whether in the event it will be my 'miserable, tattered banner'

(S --) or another, larger and darker piece of tattered cloth, with a picture on it, that will be shot full of holes, flap madly, and disappear before our eyes, is for you to decide. Naturally enough, I hope for the latter outcome. It's not that I want Riverbank to disappear altogether; but I do want it to disappear from our considerations of early Chinese landscape painting, where it has no place.

(S --.) Riverbank. A number of people have contributed to this paper; some are named in the notes to the published form, others have preferred not to be. I must credit especially Professor Hironobu Kohara with a great deal of help--my paper could almost be considered a collaboration between the two of us. Kohara was, I believe, the first to argue in print against the authenticity of Riverbank. I should add that most specialists in our field, outside a special circle identified with two universities and a museum, are deeply skeptical about Riverbank; I won't list them, and some of them, for whatever reasons, don't want to be named anyway. So Sherman Lee and Kohara and I are only the most conspicuous figures in a much larger corps of non-believers.

The form of my paper was more or less dictated by its subject and aim. The arguments that can be brought against the authenticity of Riverbank are too numerous and diverse to fall easily into a continuous scholarly discourse, and I haven't attempted that, but have organized it instead as a series of counts, or charges. Since the paper has already been published in the symposium volume, I'll use my time this morning mostly for those counts that need slides, assuming that people seriously interested in this controversy will read my paper, along with the others, and withhold final judgement until they have both heard us and read us. I'll only summarize the other, unillustrated sections briefly at the end.

Underlying what follows are three large beliefs. The first is that Riverbank, although attributed to the great 10th century landscapist Dong Yuan, is a forgery made by Zhang Daqian (1899-1983.) I say this in full awareness that it's the most contentious point, and that the thrust of much of the writing that has appeared in defense of the work is to "prove" that Zhang could not possibly have done it, for reasons of style, quality, or physical condition. (You will find, for instance, throughout the published symposium volume statements by supporters of the painting that it cannot possibly be modern or by Zhang, as if saying it often enough and in unison could make it true.) The second assumption is that even the highly versatile Zhang couldn't altogether avoid incorporating traits of his own style into his forgeries, and that his style can be recognized and distinguished from tenth century landscape style. The third is that Zhang, skillful and clever as he was, made mistakes that can be caught, and that together rule out an early origin for the painting.

To the argument that we don't have enough safely datable tenth century paintings to exclude any new contender for that period, I would reply that we do have, and we can. Another evasive tactic is to say: But the painting doesn't look like Zhang Daqian's forgeries, or like a modern painting. Zhang would have been happy to hear this, since it's exactly the response he hoped and worked for. Indeed, one of Zhang's forgeries doesn't look like another, and all of them do their best not to look like modern paintings. The works I'll show in comparisons with Riverbank will mostly not look like it either, in any simple sense. But some of them, made by Zhang Daqian both under his own name and as forgeries, will be shown to have distinctive features in common with Riverbank even when they are otherwise in different styles. Moreover, these distinctive features are not, I believe, to be seen in genuinely early Chinese landscape paintings.

In this connection I think it was clever of the Met to bring the British Museum's so-called "Juran," a generally recognized Zhang Daqian fabrication, and hang it beside Riverbank, in the hope that people will say: These two don't look alike, they can't possibly be by the same painter. If we were to hang the Dutch forger Van Meegeren's "Disciples at Emmaus," the masterwork among his forgeries of Vermeer, done on canvas of Vermeer's period, painstakingly painted over seven months and carefully aged, beside one of his later, quicker, and sloppier productions, the effect would be the same, I think. They wouldn't look alike, but they would in fact be by the same painter-forger.

Some circumstances of that kind must underly the physical differences described in Mike Hearn's paper on the comparative physical analysis of Riverbank and two other Zhang Daqian forgeries: they needn't be more than the differences between a work carefully painted, perhaps on old silk, and skilfully furnished with the attributes of age, vs. others on which less time was spent and less technical expertise lavished in the mounting and aging. The latter was done for Riverbank by the late, remarkable Meguro Sanji of Tokyo, with whom I spent many enlightening hours on many visits to his studio; he could perform near miracles of making a painting take on more or less any appearance you chose, making seals and inscriptions appear or disappear, and so forth. As for the silk: early on in this project I turned to the only scholar I know who has made a careful comparative study over some years of old Chinese painting silks, Robert Mowry, head of the Asian Art section at the Sackler Museum at Harvard. He doesn't want to suggest a dating for the silk of Riverbank until he has studied it out from under glass; he's read Mike Hearn's essay and has some questions about it, but since he's here and can speak for himself if he wants to, I'll quote only this from a letter he wrote in March of last year: "Even if the silk turns out to be 'old,' I don't think the painting is of the same age." And more recently he writes: "I assume that old silk was sometimes available to those who searched for it--" and: "If the silk is old, the date of the painting still has to be determined on the basis of style and connoisseurship." Which is exactly what I'm doing today. Robert van Gulik (Ch. Pictorial Art, 1962, p. 391) expresses the same view, writing that even if the silk or paper is proven old, it doesn't mean that the painting is of the same age, and he adds, on the basis of his intimate knowledge of the Japanese and Chinese mounters studios and art markets: "In a country like China where for centuries antiquity and antiques have been regarded with nearly religious veneration, it is not too difficult to acquire blank sheets of antique paper, and unused rolls of old silk." I myself own a painting by the mid-18th century master Li Shih-cho which, he writes in his inscription, was done on a piece of Song-period xuan paper.

Still another authority writes: "The desired appearance of paper or silk of a given age could be artificially produced. On occasions, it was perhaps even possible for the forger to use a genuine piece of ancient material suitable for his purpose." He provides a cautionary example: in the mid-1950s Zhang Daqian brought to Japan a would-be Dunhuang painting with an 8th century, Tang dated inscription--a painting that is now recognized by everyone, including this writer, to be one of Zhang's forgeries. The painting was subjected to technical analysis by laboratory specialists in Tokyo, and, he reports, "From the physical standpoint, the forgery was almost perfect . . . microscopically and chemically, it was thought that everything looked as one might expect of a handsome specimen of Tang workmanship. There were, in fact, plans afoot to publish the findings, as a standard textbook on technical analysis of a Tang painting." And he comments: "It is clear, therefore, that scientifically ascertained data must be interpreted not only in the framework of the stylistic evidence of the painting, but also according to our special historical insight with regard to the problem in question." These wise words, with which I couldn't agree more, are from the very good 1962 article on "The Problem of Forgeries in Chinese Painting" by my colleague Wen Fong (pp. 98, 106)--the same who, nearly half a century later, writes: ". . . it is important for us to recognize that based on physical as well as stylistic analysis, the painting [that is, Riverbank] cannot be a work of the 20th century nor the creation of the renowned modern forger . . . Zhang Daqian." The two statements aren't absolutely irreconcilable, but they certainly pull in opposite directions. I will invoke the 1962 Wen Fong against the 1999 one and continue to argue that Riverbank not only can be 20th century and by Zhang Daqian, but, as I will show, it is.

Even those who recognize Riverbank as a forgery by Zhang Daqian, and who point to serious representational flaws in it, acknowledge also that it's the masterwork among his forgeries, his "Disciples at Emmaus," and stands very high in his oeuvre as a whole. Although, as I'll show, virtually every element in it can be matched in Zhang's other paintings, whether done under his own name or under the names of the old masters, nowhere else does he combine these particular elements into such an impressive and imposing whole. The right response to it, then, isn't "This is too good to be by Zhang Daqian," but rather "This is an exceptionally fine Zhang Daqian, one of his finest," which will be giving him the credit he deserves.

Count 1. The work cannot be fitted into tenth century Chinese landscape painting as we know it from reliable works of that period.

To convince anyone of this, I would have to present a series of slide lectures on early Ch. LS painting, showing how the reliable works differ from copies, imitations, school works, spurious attributions. I've done that in courses given at Berkeley, Chicago, and Princeton, and hope that most sharp-eyed students who sat through them will respond to Riverbank with appropriate skepticism. But it's obviously impossible to do anything like that here, although at later points I'll introduce some of the stylistic arguments against an early date for the painting.

(-- S.) For now, a single one: the upper part of Riverbank is completely anachronistic, besides being sloppily executed, as if it were unfinished or finished off quickly. In tenth century landscape, mist or fog when present at all is restricted to small areas. Nowhere can one see mountaintops disappearing altogether, or (as in upper right) hovering ambiguously in far distance, unsupported by any indication of how they continue below. Tree groups in this upper area are placed in otherwise empty space so as to indicate continuation upward of the mountain slope. This whole upper area is essentially unreadable, and not because of damage or repainting. Perhaps Zhang meant it to be read as the murkiness of a rainstorm; but it's no less anachronistic for that. (Point out geese. WF: "Wild geese fly into the darkening sky.")

So many features of Riverbank point to later periods that one can properly term it a pastiche. Richard Vinograd wrote about it, from a photo given him in a doctoral connoisseurship exam years ago: "Over the whole painting there hangs an air of suggestive obscurity, along with scattered hints of early styles that allow the viewer to fill in mental images of ill-understood early landscape styles, while failing ultimately to really render the basic qualities that would qualify it as an early landscape. I would suggest that it is a relatively recent pastiche. . ." I'm completely in agreement with that assessment, and Vinograd, after studying the work again recently in the original, doesn't see any reason to change it. Those who adopt a fall-back position--the painting may not really be by Dong Yuan, but at worst dates to the later Song? or Yuan?--face this difficulty: it is not consistently in any period style.

Count 2. The painting has serious, in fact fatal, structural flaws. and is filled with representational inconsistencies.

This is an aspect of the work recognized by many viewers who try to read it in the way one reads genuinely early Chinese landscape paintings, as coherent pictures, and find they cannot. Since Sherman Lee has addressed this issue, I'll be brief about it for now, and will touch on other instances of it later.

The river winding out of distance turns all but imperceptibly into a road with people walking on it. It's all very well to point out that the river and road don't really connect, if one looks very closely, and that there are even two thatched houses situated where they join; the fact remains that they are visually continuous--if they weren't, they wouldn't be read that way by so many people who have spotted this anomaly. A good early artist wouldn't have permitted such visual confusion. But in Zhang Daqian's landscapes, as we'll see, rivers and roads winding out of depth often exhibit this kind of ambiguity.

(-- S.) Zhang also has trouble with tree groups, as here, at the bottom of the painting. (Describe) We will probably be told that these oddities are the result of damage and repainting, or that such trivial lapses are insignificant in the face of what Wen Fong calls "the ancient master's tireless and obsessive search for representational 'truth'." That kind of lofty observation allows one to avoid the specifics and offer grand generalities instead. I would rather, like Sherman Lee, look long and hard and closely at the painting, and take garbled passages like these seriously.

Since this is a fundamental point of disagreement among us specialists, as will be brought out over and over in this symposium, let me take a moment, not really to digress, but to clarify what I mean, and I think Sherman and others mean, in making the objections we do against the painting. For this purpose I'll introduce one non-Riverbank example:

(S,S.) the famous two-legged tripod. This will appear before you again this afternoon, and you'll get a different account of it; I want to give mine, briefly, so that there is no misunderstanding about what we are talking about. The detail at left is from the painting "Examining Antiquities" supposed to be by the Ming master Du Jin (it was in great Met exhibition of 1996 from the Palace Museum); the detail at right is from another version of the right one-third of this composition, now in Yale U. Art Gallery. (Describe.)

Now, one would think that what happened here is sufficiently obvious: the copyist botched this passage (and a number of others in the painting), in a way that totally rules it out as the work of a major Ming master. But have we Chinese painting specialists agreed on this? Far from it. You can't imagine (unless you've read our published correspondence) how many ingenious ways have been devised to avoid accepting this simple truth--which, in my formulation, goes like this: a Chinese painting is among other things a picture, and a good Chinese painting is among other things a good picture. (This remains true, by the way, even when the artist is using some highly individual style or introducing expressive distortions or whatever.) Those who don't want to believe this, or to accept its implications, tell us that because Chinese artists weren't pursuing form-likeness, they didn't care about "getting it right" representationally; or that to argue as I do is to impose western concepts of realism or naturalism onto the Chinese pictures (the dread charge of "orientalism" has even been invoked.) And so forth--an extraordinary array of evasive tactics to avoid admitting the obvious. The copyist and the forger aren't always one and the same, of course, but they have one crucial thing in common: both are driven by primary purposes other than representation or depicting things; and because of this, both are likely to slip into producing imagery that is garbled and unreadable, and thus to give themselves away. What Sherman Lee and I and others find unacceptable in Riverbank as an early painting isn't just that it fails to fit this or that criterion of style, but that it's full of representational mistakes, two-legged tripods. And no amount of tricky arguing can change the evidence of our eyes and make these go away.

Now, back to Riverbank.

Count 3. Riverbank agrees in characteristic features with Zhang Daqian's signed works, especially those from the late 1940s.

(S,S.) In the late 1940s Zhang Daqian was experimenting with a compositional type featuring a towering bluff at one side and a long recession to a high horizon on the other. In this 1948 work, the recession is marked with numerous winding and zigzagging streaks or shapes of white, which can be read as roads, rivers, or the flat tops of hillocks and plateaus. Sometimes it is clear which is which, but often it is not.

(-- S.) A landscape from 1949 follows the same general scheme; but now a concavity has been opened in the tall bluff, and a waterfall set in it. Two buildings mark the place where the river ends. The earth masses exhibit more of directional thrust, and a row of mixed trees, including two crossed pines, stretches across the foreground.

(--S.) Another work from 1949, for which Zhang claims in his inscription a Dong Yuan model, titled Immortals' Dwellings at Huayang. The waterfall is here set in a dark cleft, and pours over a three-stepped base before spreading into the foreground, where the water surface is covered with a fish-net pattern, and a house with figures is built over it. All this agrees with Riverbank, as does the tree with bunched leaves and an elongated trunk that curves strangely in its lower part. (Other trees) At left, a building marks the juncture of river and road--not confusable here, since the river is broad and the road narrow. Fu Shen writes about this painting that Zhang "believed that in this work he became the equal of Dong Yuan." A reasonable next step, one might surmise, was to paint a Dong Yuan, using this basic compositional scheme and incorporating many of the features we can observe in these 1948-49 works.

(--S.) In spite of Zhang's claim of a Dong Yuan model, however, this compositional type has no true precedent among extant early paintings. The closest to it is this landscape of Ming date in the Palace Museum, Taipei, ascribed to Dong Yuan and titled Summer Mountains Before Rain. It may well have inspired Zhang Daqian, but it can't serve as an early and supportive parallel for the composition of Riverbank.

Count 4. Riverbank matches Zhang's other forgeries in prominent features that are unparalleled in reliably early paintings.

(--S.) An inscription in the manner of Emperor Huizong on this one proclaims it to be Dong Yuan's Myriad Trees and Strange Peaks. The picture is obviously by Zhang, who did another version under his own name; it may be from the period of the late 1940s we have just considered, and features the same winding streaks of white, meant to be read as paths and streams.

(S,S.) More interesting is this "Juran" forgery (at left), once owned by the Hong Kong collector Chen Rentao (J. D. Chen), who published it in 1955; the painting must be a few years older than that. It's apparently based on a Ming work (at right) in the Juran manner (although attributed to Dong Yuan) in the old collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. Zhang's copy is furnished with the usual set of spurious "old" seals, including the ssu-yin half-seal, which appears also on Riverbank. The copy differs from its model in two notable ways: the blurry brushwork (a feature of Zhang's style to be discussed later), and the top of the hill, which has no distinct crest but simply disappears into the dark silk. Why Zhang allowed this to happen is a question; but we see it also in Riverbank, and nowhere in early Chinese painting.

(S,S) A clue to understanding this curious feature of Zhang's forgeries may be recognized in another of his signed works from the late 1940s, the Mountain Temple and Drifting Clouds, painted in 1947. Here he employs a compositional device favored (and probably invented) by Dong Qichang (1555-1636) as seen in the work by him at left: setting up dynamic energies in the construction of an ascending mountainside, with heavily-modeled masses pushing this way and that, thrust answered by counterthrust, and then containing them--barely--with a simple, flattening contour line at the top. Deleting even this inconclusive ending, an easy move, leaves the mountaintop unbounded, as in the J. D. Chen painting and Riverbank.

(S--.) (Riverbank) The dynamic build-up of the mountainside in Mountain Temple is strikingly similar to that in Riverbank, featuring the same slanting and serrated flat plateaus, the same rows of the same trees diminishing upward in size and clarity. As we will see, these forms appear conspicuously also in others of Zhang's "early" forgeries. One may even feel that Zhang has here given himself away by using so blatantly the materials of his "early" forgeries in a picture done under his own name--materials that are not (let me emphasize the point once more) to be seen in truly early landscape paintings. In his inscriptions on this and the Immortals Dwellings of 1949, Zhang writes of mastering the Dong Yuan style by "consulting" works by Dong in his own collection. What he had really mastered in the course of producing this impressive group of paintings is a system of forms and compositional devices that would serve as a repertory for his forgeries of tenth-century landscapes.

(S,S. Details.) I think of this as my "killer comparison"--anyone who isn't persuaded by it isn't, I think, open to persuasion. (Point out.) And if someone tries to tell you that the resemblance is simply a matter of Zhang learning from Riverbank, don't believe it--that's not the way it works. Wen Fong writes in his paper, hopefully (in the old sense), "When Cahill compares Riverbank with works by .. Zhang Daqian, he points only to superficial form elements and motifs and compositional patterns." But that won't wash; it's another instance of avoiding close looking by keeping one's observations on a high plane of generality. What I'm showing isn't superficial at all, it's the very substance of the painting. Such a distinctive set of forms and way of combining them is just what makes up a style, identifies an artist-- more tellingly, I think, than the much-vaunted brushwork. Zhang could imitate the brushwork of Bada Shanren, or Shitao, skillfully enough to deceive "some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time"--although there are those who will claim they can always tell the difference. (Don't believe them.) But Zhang couldn't avoid giving himself away in passages such as this.

(S,S.) A spurious "Juran" handscroll titled "A Myriad Ravines" that was sold at auction in 1987 is another of Zhang's pastiches, filled with antique-looking inventions that again fail to pull together into a coherent picture. Among the imagery that should be familiar is the river winding out of an ambiguous distance, widening and narrowing as if arbitrarily,

(S --, det. of right) the zig-zagging, flat-topped bluffs, here elongated into bizarre forms; the profusion and diversity of trees; the soft, blurry dotting

(S --, det. of left) and, near the end, the steep slope with rows of trees that swoops dramatically upward--and disappears. The scroll could have been a kind of warming-up exercise for Riverbank, Zhang's masterwork in the genre, where these motifs are handled with considerably more finesse.

(S,S.) A hanging scroll in the same style, also ascribed to Juran and purporting to be from the collection of Emperor Huizong (with the appropriate seals and title) must have been done by Zhang around the same time--we should eventually be able to work out a chronology for his forgeries of particular masters. It bears an authenticating inscription by the collector-connoisseur Wu Hufan, who saw it in 1951. (I cite in my paper a number of cases in which well-known connoisseurs wrote "authenticating" inscriptions on Zhang's fakes, out of friendship or whatever motivation.) The scenery it presents, like that of the handscroll, is highly mannered and unnatural; one aspect of Riverbank's superiority is that in it, Zhang avoided such mannered patterning.

(S,S.) A handscroll once attributed to the early Song master Yan Wengui, sold at auction last March, is another work that has many features in common with Riverbank: the profusion of windblown trees of diverse types scattered throughout the composition, the fishnet pattern on the water, the zigzag mesa, the mysterious lighting--not to speak of the familiar array of impressive "old" seals.

Count 5. Brushwork, or lack of it.

Some supporters of Riverbank contend that its brushwork confirms its authenticity. This is an odd contention in view of the fact that in most of the areas of Riverbank that represent earth or rock surfaces there is in a sense no brushwork--no traces, that is, of the brush having been put down and moved so as to leave distinct brushstrokes. The ink is rubbed onto the silk smoothly in these areas, without separate, visible strokes.

(S,S.) In this, of course, it differs fundamentally from the systems of brushwork commonly seen in early Chinese landscape, in which the brushstrokes, even when they seem strange and sloppy (as in the work in the Kurokawa collection ascribed to Dong Yuan, detail at left) or overlap and interweave (as in the Beijing Palace Museum Xiao-Xiang handscroll, detail at right), still read as distinct strokes. Needless to say, these two paintings, along with others attributed to the artist, are themselves problematic both in their dating and in their relationship to Dong Yuan, so that for Riverbank not to look like them is certainly not a count against it.

(S,S.) The argument has been made that the brush technique seen in Riverbank represents a stage in the history of Chinese landscape painting before cunfa or texture-stroke systems were developed, and that Riverbank agrees in this respect with two generally accepted tenth-century paintings, the anonymous Daoist Retreat in the Mountains found in a Liao tomb at Yemaotai, and the Lofty Scholar by Wei Xian (active 960-73). But a study of details betrays important differences. In the Liao tomb painting the earth masses are powerfully sculpted by brushstrokes that have the double function of shading, as they are applied densely or thinly to render shadow and light, and texturing, imparting tactility and earthiness. Moreover, while they are not everywhere distinct, they tend to linearity, as if made by a dragged brush, and direct the movement of the viewer's eye over the curving surfaces, thereby enhancing the three-dimensionality of the forms.

(-- S, another detail) The result is a landscape in which spaces are strongly hollowed out, enclosed by convincingly-rendered concavities in these earth masses. We can see a similar effect achieved in the well-known Shôsôin biwa (lute) landscape.

(S,S.) The same is true in the Wei Hsien Noble Scholar, in which the ink is brushed onto the earth masses so as to render light and shadow and tactility but also direction--here, mostly upward, for an effect of height. Again, the earth forms are sculpted in a readable way--I have sometimes said about such earth masses in early paintings, to describe their plastic readability, that the visual information provided would suffice for re-creating them in modeling clay--at least, the sides of them facing the viewer.

(S,S.) Compare now Riverbank, where the almost strokeless rubbing of ink onto the silk produces an undifferentiated texturing and a light-and-shadow modeling so inconsistent as to make both the forms themselves and their interrelationships in some places unreadable. This is not a deliberate and expressive manipulation of geological forms and their lighting, as in Guo Xi's Early Spring; it is the outcome of a lack of full control, and results in an effect of arbitrariness. Often we cannot be sure whether one form is in front of another or behind it. If we try to read, for example, the middleground conglomerate of earth masses and, presumably, rocks, we are frustrated everywhere. (Point out.) This is what Sherman Lee calls "total confusion."

(S --.) We find a comparable blurriness, not in any early painting, but in the British Museum's "Juran," now recognized as a Zhang Daqian forgery. It is in a different style from Riverbank, but the application of ink is similar, with large and small brushstrokes merging with rubbed-on ink into an atmospheric obscurity. A representational problem caused by this technique is that forms, unless clearly bounded, tend to merge confusingly with surrounding areas--as here, where the trees merge with the hillside behind.

(-- S.) Seeing this, we understand why we cannot make out the top of the thrusting bluff that terminates so indecisively the middle-ground landmass of Riverbank--it is not set off visually from the equally confused area meant to appear behind it. That is why, in fact, there are so many places in this part of the painting where we are not even sure what we are supposed to be looking at.

(S--.) Richard Barnhart has likened the rendering of earth forms without contours in Riverbank to their rendering in Zhao Gan's handscroll Early Snow on the River. This strikes me as an unfortunate comparison, since Riverbank comes off so badly in this respect against the Zhao Gan work, in which the forms are consistently distinct, never blurring or fusing ambiguously as do those in Riverbank.

Count 6. Compositional method, animated landforms.

(S--.) While one can, of course, find landforms that function dynamically in early Chinese landscape compositions, there are none quite like those in Riverbank, or composed in such a way, lunging diagonally and countered by masses lunging in the opposite direction. The artist, I submit, was very familiar with this compositional method as it had been developed by Dong Qichang and his followers, and used it, perhaps unconsciously, in this inappropriate context.

(--S.) Juxtaposing Riverbank with a landscape painting by Dong Qichang, we can observe that in certain respects the two works have more in common than either has with any genuine early landscape. Besides the domination of the composition by pointed, volumetrically-rendered earth masses that engage in vigorous diagonal thrusts and counter-thrusts, we can note the placing of small, blocky masses at the feet of slopes, and the line-up of trees of strikingly varied types in lower left. (For these, one is supposed to think of the Kurokawa "Dong Yuan" as a parallel, but the passages are quite dissimilar.)

(-- S.) (Wang Hui doing an imitation "Xu Daoning.") The heavy shadowing in the ravines and crevices that separates these masses enhances the dramatic effect, just as it does in Riverbank. Again, nothing of the kind can be found in early landscape--the lighting in Guo Xi 's Early Spring, for instance, is very different. Zhang Daqian couldn't resist dramatizing, making his "early" pictures more visually exciting than they properly should be. And Riverbank is indeed exciting in this way. It's as if a Cézanne landscape were dropped in among a group of Claude Lorrains--it would stand out as far more stimulating, for 20th cent. viewers, than its companions.

(-- S.) The over-strenuous, muscular forms in Riverbank must be distinguished from the diagonally-pushing rock and earth masses seen in some early landscapes, such as the rocky background of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Sakyamuni Preaching a Sermon on the Vulture Peak (Hokke Mandara), perhaps ninth century in date. The dynamic forms here are limited to a particular area of the composition, and are not expanded to become an organizing principle for the whole.

(-- S.) Zhang Daqian's fondness for over-animated compositions based on diagonally-disposed masses is seen in others of his forgeries, such as the composition attributed variously to Guan Tong and Liu Daoshi--here a detail from the latter.

(-- S) To bring us back to the quieter world of truly early Chinese landscape, here is a Song-period work in the Juran manner, the so-called Xiaoyi Searching for the Lanting Sutra. We can argue about the date--I myself have put it as late as Southern Song. But the landscape forms, while they belong distinctively to the Juran manner, are stable and earthy; the trees diminish convincingly and do not attempt to exhaust the entire repertory of tree-types; the whole composition is undramatic, clearly readable, and, exactly because it does not lay claim to being the Mona Lisa of Chinese painting, deeply satisfying.

Count 7. The lighting in Riverbank is too dramatic and sophisticated.

Here again, the artist reveals his own time, unintentionally. This is another aspect of the work that strikes many first-time viewers immediately, and another that makes it so visually stimulating. It is achieved through pronounced light-and-dark contrasts on the forms (often with too-sudden transitions), but also by creating areas of unexplained luminosity in the picture. The lighting is not naturalistic, that is, but more an unnatural glow, as though the forms themselves were radiating light.

(S,S) It is what distinguishes the British Museum "Juran" (at right) strikingly from the Shanghai Museum picture (at left) that is its model, an old work in traditional style, however one may date it.

(S,S.) One sees it in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts "Guan Tong"--the cliffs flanking a dark ravine will be suddenly and strangely sunlit.

(S,S.) Or in the "Yan Wengui" "Wind on the River" scroll, former Juncunc Collection, right. The effect is striking also in Zhang's figure painting forgeries, such as this "Anonymous Tang" picture (left) of Laozi passing the barrier in his oxcart. In all these paintings Zhang was playing to a belief, which is not without basis, that early Chinese artists sometimes used illusionistic lighting effects of a kind that all but disappear after the early Song.

Count 8. The family scene; the abundance of figures.

(S --.) (detail from Riverbank) According to Kohara's observation, which is consistent with my own, nowhere in Song or earlier landscape painting--independent landscape, that is, as distinct from narrative or some other pictorial type for which landscape is setting--can one find a scene like this one, in which the "lofty scholar" is accompanied by his wife and two children. Moreover, this group is only part of a rich quasi-narrative complex involving some nine other figures. Shih Shou-ch'ien is right, in his paper, in saying that we have always associated compositions of this type with the Yuan dynasty, and especially with Wang Meng. But when he argues that Riverbank now allows us to see the type as originating in the tenth century, and then uses this newly-created category of early landscape to provide a comfortable place for Riverbank in that period, we have a classical case of the circular argument. I say this as one who has always admired Shih Shou-ch'ien's scholarship and writing as consistently intelligent and original.

(-- S.) The problem is that while figure groups of this kind have a place in such genre works as Zhao Gan's Early Snow on the River handscroll, a pictorial disquisition on the lives of fishermen for which the landscape serves as environment, they do not, judging from extant examples, belong in monumental landscape paintings, in which the landscape is itself the central subject and the figures are smaller and more conventional.

The Wei Xian Lofty Scholar doesn't provide a good parallel either, for reasons given in my paper.

(S,S.) Zhang Daqian, on the other hand, likes to spot his landscapes with narrative-like figure groupings, in pictures that have no specific subjects. In the "Liu Daoshi" work, the scholar reclines, his book beside him, while a traveler crosses a bridge behind, a boy draws water below, and another scholar and his servant emerge from a ravine at right, and above is a farewell scene outside a retired scholar's house. (In my published paper I cite several others of Zhang's forgeries that are similarly overpopulated.)

Zhang Daqian apparently lacked the restraint that prevented early landscapists from livening up their pictures with profusions of active, attention-drawing figures.

(S,S. Dark slides.) The remaining six counts, which are not so dependent on visual materials, I will summarize briefly.

Count 9. The signature.

Suffice it to say that it is highly suspect, and even some who think the painting early believe the signature was added by Zhang Daqian. The problems raised by it are discussed in my printed paper.

Count 10. The seals appear not to match those on more acceptable works.

Even the supporters of Riverbank have backed away from earlier claims, in several published writings, that the seals can support the early date and importance of the painting. The would-be early seals follow the pattern commonly seen on Zhang Daqian's forgeries of old paintings.

Count 11. There is no secure, identifiable reference to Riverbank in any old catalog or other text.

This one is self-explanatory. The painting's supporters attempt to identify it with a work by Dong Yuan of that title in Zhou Mi's 13th century Yunyan guoyan lu. But it cannot be the same painting. Ankeny Weitz, whose doctoral dissertation is a study of that book, uses Riverbank as an example of what she calls modern "misuses" of the book by collectors eager to match paintings they own with those recorded in it, and points out that the Riverbank mentioned there was a short handscroll, not a large hanging scroll. Enough said on that count.

Count 12. There is no painting from the Yuan period or later that really appears to be based on Riverbank.

It is sufficient here to comment that none of the works cited in Wen Fong's two papers as compositionally similar strike my eye as clearly related to Riverbank at all. With enough time I would demonstrate this by comparisons; but you can do it for yourselves.

Count 13. The "too good to be true" phenomenon.

When the "paper trail" of signature, seals, and purported correspondence to records in old books is as full and distinguished as it is here, and the work comes from the hands of Zhang Daqian without any clearly traceable earlier history, it is reason enough for deep suspicion, since Zhang's other forgeries reveal how adept and painstaking he was in laying these trails. For this, too, please read my discussion in the printed paper.

Count 14. An Alternative Recent History for Riverbank

The now-famous letter from Xu Beihong and the set of circumstances and "evidence" associated with that story have been generally held to support Riverbank, or at least to eliminate the likelihood that it was painted by Zhang Daqian, by proving that it was in existence in 1938, before Zhang began his career as a forger of pre-Song paintings. It has been a major support for believers in the painting. But when one looks more closely into the letter along with other so-called evidence, it proves to be full of anomalies and contradictions, and is itself clearly a concoction, like the painting. Most everything that was claimed for this letter has been overturned in recent investigations by several people--the recipient, the dating, the present owner, the interpretation of its contents; and supporters of the painting have been revising their stories accordingly. Kohara argues in his paper that the letter is itself a forgery by Zhang Daqian. My assumption has been that Xu Beihong wrote it, but at Zhang's request, to oblige him and support his fabrication. Whichever is the truth, and more research may clear up the question, the letter has become more an embarrassment than a support for believers in Riverbank, since a genuinely early painting with a real provenance would not have needed such an obviously fabricated one. Moreover, the nature and extent of Zhang Daqian's involvement in the fabrication tends to confirm his authorship of the work, along with all the other indications. Here I particularly entreat all those seriously interested in the Riverbank controversy to read this last section of my paper.

I originally had a fifteenth count, which by editorial decision was turned into an afterword, calling attention to the cumulative weight of all the foregoing. None of these counts, in my view, can legitimately be brought against any genuinely early Chinese landscape painting, whereas all of them can be brought against Riverbank. The conclusion to be drawn seems inescapable. The only question that remains, I think, is how long it will be before Riverbank joins the Etruscan horses and other recognized forgeries of early art works in the Met's basement, where we can all visit it from time to time to admire it as the handiwork of the brilliant Zhang Daqian--to whose memory, finally, (a real memory--I knew him well) I dedicate this paper. Thank you

CLP 33: 1999 "Chang Dai-chien in California." Symposium, San Francisco State Univ.

Chang Dai-chien in California: paper for Sept.25 symposium

Preliminary remarks. Well-chosen theme, etc. I was involved w. Chang Ta-ch'ien over many years, in a number of connections. Let me run through them briefly by way of introduction.

S,S. I met Chang first in Kyoto (etc.) Tawaraya. He came to Freer in 1959? (slide missing) Here, at our apt in D.C., w. infant son Nicholas, b. 1958; now has four children of his own and teaches classical art and archaeology at U. Wisconsin. I looked at lots of ptgs in Freer collection w. Chang, espec. old col., --Chinese connoisseurs like Chang, or CCWang have a kind of dream of seeing all the good Chinese paintings that survive, and deciding whether they are genuine or not, and spend much of their lives pursuing that dream. (I had same dream, for many years.) I learned a lot from Chang, as I had already in Japan, and made interesting discoveries among the old Freer ptgs..In 1963 I wrote a short essay on his ptg for an exhibition in NYC. (Photo of him in 1975)

S, S. These two photos can symbolize Chang's move to Calif. Right: by Ch. photographer in Taipei who specialized in composite photos, many of them setting Chang in various ideal roles, such as the scholar-recluse in the wilds; other a real photo of Chang taken at Pebble Beach, probably ca. 1970. His love for the Monterey cypresses was a big reason why he bought a house and spent more and more time there in the late 1960s. So it's as if he were realizing an ideal, doesn't need to fake it any more.

After I moved from the Freer Gallery to U.C. Berkeley in 1965, I found myself coming together with Chang on various occasions, as described briefly in my "colophon" for the catalog. (Oct. '68: C.C.Wang exhib. opening here...some may still remember.) Chang was given a major retrospective at the Asian Art Mus. in 1972; many of you probably saw it.

S,S. From the mid-70s, I had as my student Chang's daughter Hsing-sheng, who was known simply as Sing. When I had a seminar on Wen Cheng-ming, the 16th century artist who himself was a lover of old cypress trees (and major painter of them--one on right), I took the members, including Sing, to Point Lobos to commune with the venerable specimens there, and we stayed overnight at Chang's house and saw his garden and studio.

S -- Photos made after his move to Taiwan in 1976: one real, other artificial--anyone who knows her . . . (another fake)

My other long-time engagement w. Chang I'll only mention; not relevant to this exhib. & symposium. While in Japan in the 1950s I became aware that he was making forgeries of old paintings; encountered these in major museums; began trying to identify them, understand how to detect them. This pursuit continued over the years. Finally gave paper on this at Fu Shen's symposium in 1991; caused some commotion, since I included ptgs that other people didn't want to see as Chang's works. Last ptg treated in my paper, ascribed to 10th cent. master Tung Yüan, bought later by (or for) Met; this controversy very hot right now. In early Dec. symposium at Met I will present my case for its being by Chang, both to give him the credit he deserves for producing this impressive work, and to remove it from our histories of early Chinese landscape painting, where it has no place.

S,S. Two self-portraits from 1958, when Chang turned 60, and 1968, when he turned 70. (Anyone who has himself entered his 70s will find it hard to comment on the difference between these two w/o turning autobiographical, as I don't intend to do.) In long insc. on later one, he talks of having reached old age and adds, "Nowadays everything seems so confused and muddled." Having passed this formidable turning point several years ago, I know all too well how he felt. Pebble Beach must have seemed an ideal place to escape from a confused and muddled world.

Now, I've taken too long w. introduction, must get on to proper topic: his paintings, espec. LS ptgs, done during his period in California (loosely defined as beginning in the late 1960s, when he began to spend more and more time here.)

S,S. By the late 1940s, Chang had mastered traditional landscape styles in China to the point where he could produce creditable imitations of most any of them, in addition to doing original works drawing on these styles. These two paintings are from 1948 & 1949, when he was also making his forgeries of early landscape, a production that probably continues at least into the early 50s. It was a kind of crisis: he must have felt, as many of the most creative Chinese artists of the centuries before him had, that everything had been done, no space was left for him. Shitao (etc.) Kao Ch'i-p'ei, worried that he would never make a name for himself, began to paint with his fingers, and was an instant success. And the Yangchou masters of the 18th cent. dev. distinctive styles based in some part on rule-breaking technical innovations.

S,S. Chang's move into a new manner can be illustrated with three paintings from 1965. I'm presenting only the barest outline here, and not implying that he didn't explore the looser, splashier style earlier--he did. But the mid-60s appear to have been his major period for making the move. On the left, "The Road Through Switzerland and Austria," one of the ptgs inspired by his travels in Europe. The composition echoes his monumental landscapes from the late 1940s, and has the same spaciousness, grandeur, and readability. But the traditional way of rendering surfaces with washes and texture strokes is replaced, in some areas of the picture, with ink washes that are applied wet and allowed to puddle and run. In the landscape at right, painted in August of that year, more of the space is given to wet wash, less to fine drawing.

A main theme of my talk, from this point on, will be to suggest some of the multiple factors that underlie Chang's new style, factors that can be introduced in attempting to account for it and understand it. Here I will follow the admonitions of Michael Baxandall about relating works of art with surrounding circumstance: (etc. Cluster of circumstance.) The first, a simple one, is that splashed-ink pictures take less time, and allow a more copious production. Chang writes on the picture that he did it in New York; he was by this time very famous, and called on to do paintings for people wherever he went. Adopting this style facilitated the more copious production that had become, for him, a necessity. Here he follows a trend that had begun much earlier--I have written about the shift among later Chinese artists to the so-called "hsieh-i" styles, sketchier, less time-consuming, and some of the economic changes that underlie this shift.

S --. Another factor must be Chang's observation of the scenery of nature, in all his travels around famous mountains, which under certain weather conditions can really look this way. This is one of Joan Cohen's photographs of Huangshan, made in the 1970s. Cohen, of course, was familiar with Chinese paintings like Chang's, and the idea of creating a similar image with her camera may have been somewhere in the back of her mind. Not by any means the innocent eye.

S --. But nature can't account for Chang's more extreme ventures into the splashed-ink and splashed-color mode, which leave naturalism behind to approach, and sometimes move all the way into, abstraction, the disappearance of readable imagery. This is "Autumn Light in Dawning Gorges," done in November of 1965. (Please don't misunderstand me to be arguing that his change in style took place during just these few months; I'm using these paintings to illustrate a large view of what happened, not offering a chronology.) Here he has added a minimal scattering of distant mts, texture strokes, trees etc. to make the ink and color splashes read as elements in a painting of a dark ravine with autumn trees. A third factor, invoked sometimes by Chang in his inscriptions and writings, is the practice of certain unorthodox painters active in the 8th to 10th centuries in China, the i-p'in or "untrammeled style" artists in Shimada's famous study, who would wow their audiences by splashing the ink and sometimes color onto the painting surface freely (or at least seeming to--they must have kept more control than they let people see) and then making a picture out of the semi-random configurations with finer brush drawing. None of their works survive, nor was this mode of painting followed much in the later centuries; but that didn't stop Chang from re-creating the splashed-ink painting of the T'ang dynasty, and claiming it as a precedent. Like his friend C. C. Wang, he insists always that he is adhering to Chinese tradition even when he making radical moves.

S,S. Two landscapes from 1966 (in badly-made, over-exposed slides), "Boating on Jade Lake," in which a tree and boatman in lower left make us read the rest as a river with a wooded shore; and "Spring Mist," in which the only clues to pictorializing the scene are two houses in middle right, presumably on the shore of a lake. Another factor, our fourth: Chang, having left China and unable to return, and leading an expensive life with lots of travel, needed to appeal in his paintings to a new clientele, made up in considerable part of western buyers who were less attached to the Chinese tradition, and who found his works in the conservative, traditional styles less desirable. Among other things, this was a style meant to appeal to them. Chang felt the need, that is, to adapt his painting more to the foreign taste. And, let us remember--this is our fifth factor--that in the 1960s Abstract Expressionism, while its most creative period was over, still had enough popularity to appeal to some artists and their audiences. Chang was certainly not the only expatriate Chinese painter of this time to realize how elements of the Chinese tradition could be adapted to this development in American painting, to produce what could be seen as an exciting synthesis of east and west; it was a perception that numbers of them appear to have arrived at, usually in facile and unproductive ways, and it continues long after. Before concluding with Chang's work, I want to show a few of the other major expatriate Chinese painters, to give a quick art-historical context for Chang's stylistic shift.

S,S. What the overseas Chinese painters of this period have in common, so that we can discern in their works a definable art-historical episode, a kind of period style, is that they splash or soak or imprint the ink and color onto the paper, using some innovative techniques, and then add with a brush the minimal defining details that allow us to read these semi-random configurations as landscapes. The interaction between these artists was so rapid and fruitful that they themselves couldn't agree, then or now, on who did what first. I am inclined to give precedence for some important technical innovations to Ch'en Ch'i-k'uan, who already as a young architect at MIT in the late 1950s was experimenting with resist techniques, ways of soaking ink and color from the back of the paper, or through another piece laid over it, and so forth. I remember very well how excited I was by his exhibition at the Mi-chou Gallery in New York in 1960, in which he showed paintings inspired by his recent trip to Venice, catching the rich mottling of colorfully weathered walls seen through hazy atmosphere.

S --. This is one of them, from 1960, and represents the cathedral of San Marco, with pigeons flying up from the piazza below. If you can't make it out, it's only because I have to hurry on to keep within my time. (No brushwork here, but other ptgs by him have lots of it.)

S,S. Wang Chi-ch'ien in the 1960s, like Chang Ta-ch'ien, was replacing the more traditional brush rendering of landscape forms with ink splashes, in works from 1961 (left) and 1966 (right).

S,S. By the late 1960s (these two works dated 1970), he, too, was doing whole compositions using random techniques for applying the ink--impressing it on with crumpled paper, and so forth (he is here, you can ask him how he did it--he won't tell you) and then adding a few buildings, trees, a waterfall, to give the viewer visual clues around which to organize a landscape image.

-- S. Wang, too, began to use bright color in some of his later works. His style has always been more controlled, more disciplined, than Chang's, and he has resisted the kind of over-production that Chang often slipped into. But, very different as they are as painters, the general direction of their ptg in this period is closely related, . (1988 symposium exchange.)

S,S. The younger painters of the Fifth Moon group in Taiwan, notably Liu Kuo-sung, also played their roles in this large development. Here is Liu in 1962 (left) and 1965 (right). Liu and the others did not finish their landscapes by drawing in fine detail, but they managed in their own way to make them readable as grand visions with cliffs and lakes and waterfalls.

S,S. By the later 70s and into the early 1980s, another sea-change had swept over the overseas Chinese painters, and they were collectively moving away from abstraction and into more recognizable landscape imagery. (Liu Kuo-sung in 1977, 1983.) Some years ago I gave a lecture at Mills College tracing these large, pervasive changes over the decades, and can only assure you here that the pattern holds up surprisingly well for quite a few artists.

S,S. Back to Chang Ta-ch'ien: In these two paintings from 1967 he claims to be recording local color, the scenery of particular places: "Snowy Mountains in Switzerland" at left, "Summer Mountains of California" at right. It would be interesting to see how far one could pursue this direction into identifying another factor, and find in the paintings of this period real derivations from the character of local scenery. I won't attempt that here, but only suggest the possibility of it.

S,S. Works of 1967, left, and 1968, right. Now we had best confront another factor that is most often introduced to account for Chang's move into the splashed-ink and splashed-color style, the deterioration in his eyesight. Already in an an inscription on a painting of 1955, written on it six years later after he had discovered it in his luggage, he writes, "My eyes have not been well for three years." In another inscription he writes that "From age 60 [1958] I suddenly suffered failing eyesight." It was diabetic retinopathy, ruptured capillaries in the retina. Chang was clever and self-confident enough to claim sometimes himself that his new style was an accomodation to this problem in vision, in the belief that people would discount his statement as self-deprecation and see the change as a matter of stylistic choice, independent of physiological condition. In other words, I suspect that he would say it in the expectation that people wouldn't believe it because he himself said it--that would be just like him.

S,S. But of course his worsening vision did affect his painting, making it very difficult for him to do fine brushwork, or to see the whole composition at once. Photo of him ca. 1975, painting (lotus) with an eyepatch; a Landscape with Waterfall from 1970. By balancing and integrating the parts of the picture that could be produced through semi-controlled ink and color splashing with those that had to be done with a brush, and in different degrees maximizing the former and minimizing the latter, he kept up a copious output. At times he had to bring his eyes to within a few inches of the paper to do the fine drawing. But there is no evidence, and I have heard no suggestion, that he ever had assistants or family members do parts or all of the paintings for him, as other artists have in their late years.

S,S. Two works in the exhibition, "Cloudy Waterfall and Summer Mountain" from 1970, left, and "Snow in the Spring Mountain," 1973, right. Both done during his period in California; one could argue for either one that California scenery partly inspired it (coastal scenery); both good examples of the very satisfying combinations of splashed color and brushwork that are typical of this period. I would like, perhaps as a native Californian who grew up on the rocky coast (Fort Bragg), to see both Chang's move into the new style and his move to California as aspects of the same desire for escape, or release, a retreat from his intense engagement with the great tradition of Chinese painting on the one hand, and on the other from that tight-knit Chinese community of the cities that re-forms itself wherever enough Chinese come together, and the horde of Chinese friends and acquaintances, all giving banquets and wanting paintings, who used up so much of his time and energy. We should think, after all, of the great influx of other people who came to California in the 1960s in search of one or another kind of liberation, escape from pressures and demands and constraints they felt were weighing too heavily on them in other places. Chang of course continued to travel a lot, and was far from being a real recluse; other Chinese expatriates lived on the Peninsula and further down the coast. But he could have his stretches of quiet productivity, to design and build his garden, to paint his pictures.

S,S. Majestic Waterfall, 1981; Peach Blossom Spring, 1983. After his move to Taipei in 1976, while he continues to do the ink and color splashing sometimes, Zhang goes back to using more brush drawing in most of his paintings, making them, for better or worse, more simply and completely readable. Again, we can adduce several factors, all of them true, none of them the whole truth, in accounting for this late-life change. First, as noted before, the overseas Chinese painters as a group were moving in that direction. Second, Zhang's eyesight had improved somewhat. But also, as Fu Shen notes, he was doing more work for Chinese clients who were less likely to be satisfied with works in the color-splash style--they wanted more of the hand of Zhang Daqian for their money or their friendship. Along with an endless round of banquets and honors and personal appearances, the burden of producing so many pictures, from simple to complex, small to large, wore him down terribly. "Taiwan is really too hot," he wrote to a friend in Carmel, "and those who are seeking my paintings are too numerous; it is a burden to accept the obligations." And his insc. on the "Peach Blossom Spring" picture tells of how, even in what he had intended as a retreat built outside Taipei, he was pursued by visitors, and people building their houses near his to be his neighbors. It would not be too fanciful, I think, to read the "Peach Blossom Spring" picture, a work from the year of his death, as an expression of his deep feelings about this dilemma: a substantial outside world, done in conventional brushwork, from which one needed to escape, vs. the haven of the Peach Blossom Spring rendered by a great splash of ink and color that draws the fisherman, and the viewer, into its liberating depths.

S,S. (My final pair of slides.) It was a kind of defiance of old age and failing health, and a desire to complete a major painting while he still could, that led Chang in 1980 to accept a commission to do a huge work (about 33 feet long, nearly six feet tall) for the lobby of a new hotel in Yokohama partly owned by his longtime friend Li Hai-t'ien. He chose as his subject Mt. Lu, where he himself had never been, but which he knew intimately from numerous old paintings and poems. He worked on the painting for more than a year and a half, sporadically as his health permitted, without ever quite finishing it. It was terribly taxing--Fu Shen gives a detailed account in his catalog of the physical demands it put upon him--and it wouldn't be an exaggeration or over-dramatizing to say that this painting was the death of him. On the one hand, it's a magnificent ending to a brilliant and extraordinarily productive career; on the other, it might be seen as representing Chang's final capitulation to the system of obligations and rewards that Chinese society imposes on its members. The California years, in this context, could be imagined as a period of escape into a kind of ideal refuge, like the paradise of the Peach Blossom Spring, from which the fisherman had to emerge finally and suffer mortality like everyone else. If Chang had stayed in Pebble Beach, would he still be with us, celebrating his hundredth birthday? Idle speculation; everyone makes his choices and accepts the consequences, without knowing beforehand what they will be. And we can celebrate Chang's paintings from his California years, as the exhibition presents them, without hoping or claiming to do more than imagine, with the help of the paintings, what those years meant to Chang himself. Thank you.

Colophon on Chang Dai-chien

I first met Chang Dai-chien in Kyoto in 1955, when I was a Fulbright student there and he was working with the publisher Benrido on the four-volume picture catalog of his collection. Our common language (my spoken Chinese being poor, like his English) was Japanese, which he knew from several long stays in Japan, beginning when he was a teen-ager. I recall sitting with him in his ryokan or inn, the Tawaraya (Kyoto's most elegant), talking about paintings, he with a brush and paper in front of him: I would ask his opinion on some work, and while replying he would sketch its composition or a detail from it. This was my introduction to his amazing visual mastery of the surviving corpus of Chinese paintings in collections all over the world.

In the later 50s and early 1960s, while I was a curator at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he came there several times to look at paintings, and I came to respect both his eye for old styles (I learned a great deal from going with him through the old Freer collection, discovering and re-attributing fine but neglected pieces in it) and his own versatility and brilliance as an artist. In 1963 I had the honor of contributing an Introduction, which pleased him, to the catalog of an exhibition of his paintings at the Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York.

After I moved to Berkeley in 1965, and he to Carmel in 196?, we would meet sometimes at places where our common engagement with Chinese painting drew us, such as a symposium organized in his honor at the College of the Pacific in Stockton on "The Future of Chinese Literati Painting." I remember him at the opening of an exhibition of recent works by his friend and fellow-artist Wang Chi-ch'ien in San Francisco in October, 1968: a big, crowded gallery at the De Young Museum, with Wang as the center of attention--until, that is, the dramatic arrival of Chang, with his extraordinary charisma (an effect I associated with his outthrust, mysteriously energized beard.) I watched the sudden shift of focus within the room, feeling, as a decidedly non-charismatic person myself, some sympathy for Wang, who was Chang's equal (although very different) as a painter but completely outclassed as a commanding presence.

From the mid-70s it was my further honor to teach his daughter Sing (properly Chang Hsing-sheng) in our graduate program at the University of California. When I gave a seminar on Wen Cheng-ming, the great Ming master who had as one of his specialties the portrayal of old pines and cypress trees, I took the group, with Sing as a member, to Point Lobos to commune with the venerable specimens growing there. Through her introduction we were able to stay overnight at Chang's house at nearby Pebble Beach, and see his studio and the garden he had built there. His move away from California, and his death in Taiwan in 1983, left me feeling the loss of one of the most colorful and admirable people I have known, one of the giants of 20th century Chinese painting.

CLP 34: 1999 "Some Thoughts on the History and Post-history of Chinese Painting." Haley Lecture, Princeton

Haley Lecture, Princeton, Nov. 16, "Some Thoughts on the History and Post-history of Chinese Painting."

It's a pleasure to be back here. As many of you know, I recently enjoyed a very productive & pleasurable academic year in Princeton, ending last August, among other things spending time with my esteemed colleague Wen Fong, to whom I dedicate this lecture. Although we've been arguing about one thing or another from the time we met some 43 years ago, we've done it unwaveringly as friends, and together, partly by playing off against each other in this way, we've taken a big part in shaping our field of study. So if I stand here today in front of Wen Fong making large pronouncements about Chinese painting, some of which he will agree with, some not, it's in that spirit.

This is by unintended timing a millenial lecture, and by unavoidable timing a late-life lecture, following on a half-century of dedication to the study of Chinese painting. My teacher Max Loehr, at the first great international symposium in our field in 1970, gave his late-life periodization paper, "Phases and Content in Chinese Painting";[1] it seemed to me time for another attempt. I won't question the basic truth of Loehr's formulation up through Sung, but will see the later period differently, and concentrate on post-Sung painting. I'll be making sweeping generalizations to which any good grad student can cite numerous exceptions; obviously, I could do it myself, for another lecture undermining this one. But stopping to qualify every statement would waste far too much of everyone's time and patience. My slides will be used mainly to illustrate the argument--I won't be talking in detail about the individual paintings. Most of them will simply be identified. There will be no surprises among the slides. Finally, I hope that the direction of my own recent writing will dispel any suspicion this lecture might arouse that I want to consider Chinese painting in isolation, as an autonomous system, and so forth--a charge we know too well, since we've too often been guilty of it. I think it's sometimes useful to treat it as though it were an autonomous system, for a particular limited purpose, while knowing all the time that it isn't.

Two years ago I found myself unexpectedly involved in a large exhibition of Chinese art, the Guggenheim Museum's "China: 5000 Years", and in writing a brief general piece on Chinese painting for the catalog. I chose to open this by raising a troublesome problem: why, in spite of all the serious study that later Chinese painting has received from specialist scholars over the past half-century or so, with major private and museum collections assembled, major exhibitions and their attendant symposia absorbing but also concentrating our energies--why, in the face of all this, do certain misperceptions about later Chinese painting persist among those outside the field, including eminent art historians and critics? I quoted two to represent them, Ernst Gombrich and Arthur Danto, both deeply knowledgeable in western art history, both bold enough to venture sweeping formulations and judgements. Gombrich, reproducing a page from a Chinese 17th-century painting manual showing how to paint orchids stroke by stroke, takes this to exemplify China's "complete reliance on acquired vocabularies," and remarks that "there is nothing in Western art that compares with this conception of painting," which he characterizes as a "combination of traditionalism and respect for the uniqueness of every performance." Later Chinese painting, then, in this version, is a performance art. Danto misreads a statement in an essay by Sherman Lee, written for the catalog of an exhibition of Ming-Ch'ing paintings, to mean that Chinese painting underwent no significant change in the Ming-Ch'ing period, and asks us to "imagine . . . an exhibition that begins with Giotto and ends with Gauguin" in which "everything was in place at the beginning, further development of which was 'unimaginable and superfluous.'" And for Danto the paintings in the Ming-Qing exhibition, spanning some six centuries in their time of creation, seem "oddly contemporaneous." In support of this version of Chinese painting as essentially static through its later periods, Danto cites Roger Fry's 1926 observations about the "strange atrophy of the creative spirit" that afflicted later Chinese art, and about its "excessive reverence for tradition." For us in the field, by contrast, what has strangely failed to develop is not the art but foreign perceptions about it: has nothing happened between Roger Fry and Arthur Danto?

I offered several factors that might lie behind this somehow disturbing phenomenon: the carry-over of an ill-informed belief by pioneer Western writers on Chinese painting that its creative period ended around the end of Sung, the late 13th century, with everything after that being repetition and decline; the difficulty that even sensitive people have in recognizing and evaluating stylistic distinctions, even large and crucial ones, within an unfamiliar artistic tradition; and the habit of Yuan and later Chinese artists of claiming, in inscriptions on their works, that they are "imitating" some old master--a practice which might seem derivative, if we accept the claims at face value, but which in actuality is no more so than when T.S. Eliot "imitates" Chaucer, or Picasso "imitates" Velasquez, or Stravinsky "imitates" Monteverdi. All this is familiar enough, and students of Chinese painting in the audience will be wondering why I am going through it all again. My single glimmering of a new idea was in suggesting that while it is true enough that we cannot discern in Chinese painting after the Sung any clear, unilinear development, in the sense of successive advances in representational techniques or pervasive stylistic shifts like those the old art historians defined for European painting--from Medieval to early, high, and late Renaissance, from Baroque to Rococo to Romantic and Neo-Classical to Modern--granting this need not carry any implication that Chinese painting stopped being innovative. It might alternatively be argued that the great global shifts took place earlier in China--that the Chinese equivalent of the Giotto-to-Gauguin phase happened between the T'ang and Yüan dynasties, between the seventh and fourteenth centuries--and ended sooner, so that the Chinese arrived in their painting, long before we did, at "the end of the history of art." But I added, somewhat evasively, that "this is not the place to make that argument at length, nor am I the person to make it." More recently, trying to come up with a theme weighty enough for the Haley lecture has led me to change my mind; this is the place to make the argument at length--I hope not excessive length--and I myself, burdened as I am with an antiquated theoretical apparatus, am the person to make it--in fact, since those who occupy more advanced theoretical positions are likely to be prevented thereby from making this kind of argument, I had best do it while there is still time.

My argument can begin with another quote from Gombrich, and another disagreement. (Sir Ernst is a frequent target for such disagreements exactly because he writes clearly and directly about large matters on which others usually hedge and sidestep, if they address them at all.) Gombrich writes: "But only twice on this globe, in ancient Greece and in Renaissance Europe, have artists striven systematically, through a succession of generations, step by step to approximate their images to the visible world and achieve likenesses that might deceive the eye."[2] As is often true of such global statements, this one needs the insertion of a single phrase: except for China. The collective mastery of representational techniques by Chinese artists over the early periods, culminating, I believe, in the 10th to 11th century (China suffered no such massive disjuncture as Europe's Middle Ages, so the development is more continuous), this mastery can be said, as convincingly as it can for Western artists, to be aimed at "approximating their images to the visible world." As for likenesses that might deceive the eye, the early Chinese literature on painting, like the Western, offers anecdotes in which pictures by the most accomplished painters do exactly that, whether the eye be human or animal: otters who jump at painted fish, falcons who attack painted pheasants.[3]

So, why was China excluded from Gombrich's pronouncement? A clue to the reason is provided by Danto, who, after citing Gombrich on the two European illusionistic episodes, adds: "I think this is an underestimation. There is internal evidence that the Chinese, for example, would have used perspective if they had known about it, perhaps to their artistic detriment."

S,S. (Anon. 18c work, Chiao Ping-chen, early 18c.). I'm not sure what "internal evidence" Danto refers to--when the Italian system of linear perspective did become known to Chinese painters in the l7th and early 18th century, nearly all of them rejected it. (The few Chinese attempts to utilize it that have survived suggest why it was never more than an uncomfortable anomaly within their tradition.) On the other hand, as I've argued in various writings and am elaborating in a book-in-progress, many Chinese artists in that same period embraced other European illusionistic devices, such as chiaroscuro or the Northern European system of spaces opening back beyond spaces, in ways that heavily affected their paintings--and have mostly been ignored by foreign writers for whom linear perspective is the touchstone of fidelity to "the visible world."

S,S. Chinese ways of creating illusions of space in their pictures are no less optically persuasive for not being built around straight lines converging on the horizon. The development of successive systems for doing this, over the early centuries of Chinese pictorial art from the pre-Han period to the 10th century or so--beginning with simple intervallic space between paired, confronting figures (at right, a late Han dynasty tile, 2nd-3rd cent.), continuing through what the old art historians called space cells, and the joining of these into more extensive openings of space,

-- S. culminating in some 10th century works that create elaborate spatial structures, inviting prolonged visual penetration and exploration--is not merely a culturally biased formulation that western art historians have imposed on the Chinese works, but is a central concern of the artists who made those works, and of their audiences, manifested in the pictures themselves, as any sympathetic and perceptive consideration of them over time must recognize. And these successive advances in spatial rendering enable, in turn, more and more complex descriptive, narrative, and expressive effects. (L is a 10th or early 11th cent. painting of a flour mill powered by a waterwheel; R is sec'n of 10th cent. ptr by Ku Hung-chung, as preserved in 12th or 13th cent. copy--original would have made my point better.)

S,S. (section of "Deer in Autumn Forest"; Bamboo, Old Trees, and Rocks, att. Hsü Hsi) As for light-and-shadow effects: the Chinese artists had themselves, from pre-T'ang times through the 10th-11th centuries, developed methods of representing natural forms with illusions of three-dimensionality through light-and-dark shading techniques. The portrayal of the animals in the "Deer in an Autumn Forest" pictures (which are probably Liao dynasty works) supremely exemplifies this mastery (we can only imagine how realistic the tree foliage may have looked before the thickly-applied pigment flaked off.) And in the astonishing "Bamboo, Old Tree, and Stones in Winter," attributed to the 10th-century master Hsü Hsi, the artist has concealed his hand throughout, creating the image as if entirely out of light and dark, making the picture seem more a work of nature than a product of human artifice. That he appears to be somehow dispensing with conventions and portraying his subject in a way unmediated by style is of course only an effect, but it's a powerful one. In this it's like some 17th century Dutch paintings about which my colleague Svetlana Alpers writes: "It is as if visual phenomena are captured and made present without the intervention of a human maker." And she writes of the "selflessness or anonymity that is characteristic of Dutch painting"-- and equally characteristic, we can note, of these Chinese works.

S ---. The complex overlappings of leaves and twigs is representationally effective but technically bewildering: how was it done? Remember that when one works in ink on silk, nothing can be corrected or painted over, as it can in oil ptg. To say that the artist used some kind of resist technique may be true, but doesn't carry us far in accounting for the picture. The unassuming technical mastery goes with the effect of visual exactitude--quoting Alpers once more, "To appear lifelike, a picture has to be carefully made."[4] No pictures in China will ever be more carefully made--as pictures, that is--than these.

S,S. (Two sections of Hsü Tao-ning, KC) More or less the same is true in landscape, which around this time becomes the central subject of Chinese painting (as it will be of the remainder of this lecture.) Only small shifts in one's habits of visual reception are required to recognize paintings such as these as transmitting at least as much, in some respects more, of the typifying aspects of natural scenery than European landscape pictures generally do, and to recognize also that if the Chinese pictures fail to transmit other aspects, it is largely by choice. The elimination of color permits the painter to evoke, through consummate gradations of ink values, an optically convincing atmospheric perspective. Rendering the images of trees and rocks in endlessly varied type-forms and otherwise taming the variegation that scenes of nature offer to the eye opens the way for conveying a sense of natural order, li.

S,S ( Two details from Kuo Hsi "Early Spring," dtd. 1072..) By rejecting all that is pretty or picture-like in the Western sense (even the picture-like aspects of nature), the artist could embody the profound understanding of geological forms and phenomena, the sensitivity to conditions of season and weather and time-of-day, that inspires the loftiest achievements of the Chinese masters. It would be difficult, then, to think of ways in which the European artists succeeded better in "approximating their images to the visible world." Different conventions and assumptions, of course, underlie the two traditions. But granting this is not to say that "truth to nature" is purely a matter of more or less arbitrary conventions; on this issue I am entirely on the side of Danto, who writes that space representation "is not . . . a matter of convention any more than the senses as a perceptual system are; we are built that way. To the degree that we regard the representation of space as merely a matter of convention, the concept of progress evaporates and the structure of art history we are discussing loses any application."

S, S. (Sec'n of Nelson Gal. sarcophagus, early 6c; portion of Tun-huang wall ptg, 7th cent.) The sequence of stylistic moves that preceded the stage seen in those 11th-century works could be mapped, and up to a point has been mapped, into a coherent art-historical account. Valuable work in this direction was done by pioneer scholars such as Ludwig Bachhofer, Max Loehr, George Rowley, Alexander Soper, and others who tried to apply or adapt classical art-historical concepts of the morphology of style, derived as these were from constructions of European art history, to the Chinese materials. Needless to say, doing this left them open not only to legimate criticism--their limited access to crucial materials meant that their formulations were necessarily tentative and sometimes mistaken, based on too little evidence (or, especially in Loehr's case, on insecure evidence)--but also, more recently, to the familiar facile put-downs, as guilty of Eurocentric attempts to impose the patterns of Wölfflin and Winckelmann onto Chinese art, or of Orientalizing, Essentializing, and all the rest. None of this diminishes their achievement in laying the foundations for our later studies, which would be foolishly adrift without the underpinnings they provided. They saw their task to be, as Hans Belting writes about 19th century Western art historians, "that of ordering the works of art . . . into a sequence which appeared to be governed by a lawful development of form."

Some in my generation have carried on this project. Wen Fong has contributed heavily, among other things formulating in outline an impressive three-stage system of changes in spatial representation between Northern Sung and Yüan;[5] Dick Barnhart has made valuable contributions in his writings on Song painting; I myself have tried to lay out some parts of the history in a few writings, and to present a larger account in lecture courses given over the years. And there have been others. But no one has even tried to pull these together into a comprehensive, step by step history of early Chinese painting that considers stylistic change along with other criteria and concerns. Our generation, then, can be charged with having collectively failed to build on the achievements of the pioneers sufficiently to construct a history as solid and detailed as has been done (over a much longer period, to be sure) for European painting. Scholars in the generation after ours are on the whole disinclined to take part in such a project, or even are methodologically opposed to it. And so the great work of putting together such a history, which should be the basis upon which further studies of early Chinese painting can be undertaken, has been discredited before it has been accomplished. It's as though we had abandoned the practice of architecture before we had built our city. (Perhaps mine is an anxiety peculiar to our cultural crux: the historian Paul Cohen wrote recently about how historians of China have given up studies of large events and important people before some of the major ones had been serious studied.)[6] It might be that the history of early Chinese painting can still be written, especially with new archaeological finds augmenting our small body of safely datable monuments. Some younger scholar or group of scholars who are willing to take the time to reach a thorough mastery of the visual materials and willing also to buck the trend, turning a deaf ear to those who insist that it shouldn't be done at all, may accomplish what we have fallen short of doing. I hope so. (I don't, of course, mean that style-history should again become a central concern of Chinese painting studies; only that someone should continue doing it.)

S,S. (Li Kung-nien, late No. Sung; sec'n of Hsiao-Hsiang scroll, 1170s.) But the main point I'm making is that it can be done--Chinese painting in the early centuries is susceptible to diachronic analysis and ordering of the kind that allows the construction of an art history. This continues to be true, I believe, through the Sung dynasty, although in the 12th and 13th century the history appears more and more to divide into separate strands, as geographical, social-economic, and other factors induce artists who are contemporaries to take strikingly different stylistic directions. As before, pervasive shifts can be recognized in the ways landscapists render space and atmosphere, how they compose their pictures, how figures participate in them. The dynastic change from Sung to Yuan in the late 13th century, however, is more than a wrenching historical disjuncture brought about by the Mongol conquest of China: it marks, for Chinese painting, the end of its history.

It's worth noting here that the developmental or evolutionary phase of Chinese painting, ending with the late Sung, is accompanied (like its counterpart in the west) by a rich art-historical literature, which can be seen as beginning with a few relatively brief critical and theoretical writings in the 5th-6th centuries and reaching an early climax in Chang Yen-yüan's imposing "Record of the Painting of Successive Periods" in the 9th century, a work comparable in scope and sophistication to Vasari's in the mid-16th century, which is hailed as the beginning of western art history. Chang Yen-yuan's work is followed by a succession of substantial texts each aimed at bringing the history of painting up to date for its period. But these continue only to the 12th-13th century, after which no one attempts any such broad account. Texts from the later periods are biographical, theoretical, critical, technical--but not historical. Without meaning to offer a reductive explanation of the reasons why not, I can quote Hans Belting on the problem of writing about western art after 1800: "An art which is already produced under the welcome or unwelcome awareness of its own history, which it then seeks either to escape or to reapply, is not very well suited to an art history interested in demonstrating stable principles or evolutionary patterns."[7] All this is entirely applicable to Chinese painting after around 1300--nobody attempts a history of it because it doesn't exhibit a history, or historical development; and most of the best post-Sung painting is indeed profoundly aware of its own history.

S,S. (Att. Su Shih, Wang T'ing-yün) So, if Chinese writers on painting no longer attempt histories, how do they deal with painting of the later periods? The question cannot be answered simply, but we can observe that those who write the essays and books--who are, by definition, the literati--adopt generally the account of meaning and expression in painting that had been introduced by their exemplar Su Tung-p'o and his contemporaries in the late Northern Sung, which locates the source of expression within the artist. And they do this, not by allowing the artist to construct the meaning and expression of his picture at will, using established signifiers, but rather by assuming that the internal life of the artist, his nature and feelings and thoughts, are somehow manifested directly onto the paper or silk through brushwork, in an inarticulate mode of expression that can nonetheless be "read" by the sensitive viewer. In this they were applying to painting a reading much older in writings on poetry and calligraphy; they were also, I believe, reflecting the Sung literary critics' discomfort with the idea of fictionality in poetry, their insistence on reading the poem as relating things that really happened to the poet. (Robt. Hymes paper on Hong Mai.) Su Shih's friend Li Kung-lin writes, famously, that he "makes paintings as a poet composes poems, simply to recite my feelings and nature." Equating painting with poetry allows the artists and theorists to extend to painting the claim made for poetry: that its real content is the experience and inner life of the poet or painter.[8]

S,S. (Chao M-f in Cleveland, Wen C-m in K.C.) Traditional connoisseurs have taken Li Kung-lin's pronouncement, and similar ones by later artists, at face value ever since, as the deep truth about good Chinese painting. To this day they take pleasure in exercising their finely honed visual skills in discerning the hand of the artist, and associating the qualities of the painting in simple ways with what they know about the artist. They extend this pleasure into a theory of expression, assuring us that brushwork, the artist's "touch," is what the painting is really about, equating painting with calligraphy, deriding as philistine anyone who wants to see the painting as a picture and read its imagery before turning to its facture. This contention, probably because it enjoys the sanction of centuries of Chinese connoisseurship (which is continued into the present by such notable figures as Wang Chi-ch'ien) has gone more or less unchallenged, at least on the level of theory, as if impregnable in the face of our contrary experience--I am sure I speak for most of us in observing that for the paintings that move us most deeply, the ones we constantly return to, pleasure in brushwork accounts for only a part, and usually not even the major part, of our response. One might also suppose that this set of beliefs about artistic expression would by now have been driven from the arena of serious argument by decades of battering from theories of semiotics, intertextuality, deconstruction and the rest--the recognition that the power of art arises as much from collective as from individual production.[9] But this has not happened. There are even those who argue that Chinese cultural expressions should be somehow exempt from the modes of analysis practiced elsewhere. The linked equation: high-level Chinese painting = literati painting = brushwork = individual self-expression still makes up an unexamined underpinning for a lot of writing in our field, and so continues to stand in the way of what I believe to be more open and productive approaches.

S,S. (Ch'ien Hsüan "Dwelling," Chao M-f Ch'iao-Hua. Both early Yuan.) If individual self-expression had indeed been the principal pursuit of later Chinese painters, the situation of stasis and stagnation imagined by Western observers must surely have followed quickly upon the end of the historical phase. Fortunately, the painters were engaged in larger and more interesting projects than baring their souls. To determine what these were, we need to look to the paintings, since writings by critics and theorists, even when these were the painters themselves, are nearly always inadequate to what the artists were up to. You may wonder why this point needs to be made--it may seem self-evident--after all, scholars of Italian painting don't limit their investigations to those issues that concerned Vasari. I make it to answer another familiar charge: that introducing and pursuing matters that do not figure, or figure only weakly, in traditional Chinese writings is tantamount to imposing foreign attitudes onto Chinese art. That argument seems to me completely specious.

If we observe, for instance, that much of the most interesting Yüan and later painting is deeply engaged with devising elaborate ways to evoke and manipulate old styles, we will look in vain for any correspondingly sophisticated articulation of the practice in Yüan texts, beyond Chao Meng-fu's brief admonition (recently re-credited to his follower T'ang Hou) that the spirit of antiquity (ku-i) was the quality most to be valued in painting, or Huang Kung-wang's observation that most landscapists of his time follow either Tung Yüan or Li Ch'eng. T'ang Hou's famous six criteria for judging paintings begin with the mysterious and undefinable "spirit resonance," followed by brushwork, and put formal likeness last, but make no mention of what must by this time have been fundamental to much high-level connoisseurship: a recognition of how painters such as Chao Meng-fu and Ch'ien Hsüan were playing on the past. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang at the end of Ming strikes closer to the heart of the issue with his concept of fang, renderable as "creative imitation"; but even Tung, while taking the position of one who is enlightening others, is so uninformative about how fang imitation was to be accomplished that even the best scholars until recently could misunderstand his words as referring to a simple practice of imitation.[10] We have been able to get beyond this misunderstanding only by paying close attention to the formal relationships between Tung's paintings and his old models, and reading the significance of his transformations of these old models in the context of other painting of his time.

S.S. (Two more by Chao: Met "Trees on Plain," Cleveland fan LS) I'm showing a number of landscapes by Chao Meng-fu to suggest the stylistic diversity of his work, based as it is on diverse old styles; one is reminded of the passage in Meyer Schapiro's famous essay on style in which he points out that the whole concept must change when one deals with such a painter as Picasso, for similar reasons. The inadequacy of Chinese writings on painting in dealing with this issue seems especially odd in view of the degree to which Chinese literary culture as a whole is permeated by a consciousness of its own past, revealed not only in critical writings but also in the constant allusions within the works themselves to older texts with which the complete literatus was expected to be conversant. This was of course true of poetry, which in the later periods echoed continually the classical canon; it was also true of other literary forms: readers of David Roy's "Plum in the Golden Vase" (his translation of Chin P'ing Mei) know that a Chinese author can't even write a lurid erotic novel, a high-level one at least, without introducing on every page mini-quotations from earlier texts that must be footnoted for the foreign reader. Chinese culture in the later centuries can be seen as folding back on itself, drawing constantly on its past, without, in the best work, sacrificing the excitement of fresh, first-time creation. It attained the condition that Harold Rosenberg (as cited by Belting) defined in the 1950s for what was then contemporary art in the west: the old concept of tradition is replaced, he writes, by "a new historical consciousness . . . an awareness of art history which not only the beholder but indeed every new work shares. It demands constant innovation as much as clear references back to a history of art, a history toward which the work takes its own stance."[11] I am not suggesting any neat correspondence; Rosenberg is writing, of course, about modernist art, and I am deliberately avoiding the problem of what constituted modernism in Chinese painting--and even more the P-word, which I'm not uttering at all--a can of worms I don't care to open. I am simply saying that much of the best of later Chinese painting, and the most innovative, is infused with just that kind of historical consciousness.

S,S. (Detail from anon. 16c ptg of emperor traveling to visit imperial tombs; "history ptg." by court artist Shang Hsi.) Much, but by no means all. The painters regarded by the Chinese critics, as well as by us, as the major post-Sung masters--those who make up the canon, if you will--are nearly all, in their different ways, engaged in this practice of playing on earlier styles, and in stylistic explorations other than the pursuit of resemblance. But these make up only the part of Chinese painting that they, and some of us, consider "fine art," and recent scholarship increasingly directs our attention to another, surely more copious production of paintings that were functional, documentary, celebratory, iconic, or simply decorative.[12] (Identify) An inscription attributed to the 17th century landscapist Kung Hsien usefully draws the distinction as that between pictures, t'u, and paintings, hua; and for the present purpose, with the usual caution about how the line isn't absolutely sharp, we can adopt these terms, and add that this lecture is primarily about paintings.[13] It's also worth noting, however, that the other, larger practice of picturing in the centuries after Sung also enters a post-historical phase, in that it, too, ceases to develop, or even change significantly--Ming court artists who do works of this kind haven't notably altered the Sung academy styles they inherited, and were not encouraged by their clients and patrons to do so. The critics who formulated criteria of value did this only for literati painting; there were no generally accepted criteria, apart from a generalized "skillfulness," for the "artisan painters," as they were dismissively termed. Even with acclaimed masters such as Tai Chin and Wu Wei, it is their breaks with the main picturing tradition that win them positive notice from the critics, not their picturing skills.

S,S. (details from scroll att. Chao Po-chü, 12c) Through the Northern Sung period, great masters were praised for pictures that "made you feel as if you were really in the place," or as "rivaling creation in Nature." No such praise is possible in the post-Sung period. Emperor Hui-tsung in the early 12th century was perhaps the last important voice to honor artists for doing true-to-life pictures, and even he insisted also on poetic resonances. Chinese critics would protest this statement of the matter, saying: we don't praise picture-makers after Sung because there are none who deserve praise, no more great masters of picturing--all right, maybe Ch'iu Ying, but nobody else. But the situation was surely circular: the lack of critical recognition for whatever innovations and advances in picturing might have been made, and the lack of enthusiasm for these among collectors who mostly accepted the admonitions of the critics, must have not only discouraged such moves but also ensured that any stylistic change based on them would be short-lived.

S --. (Chang Hung Mt. Ch'i-hsia, dtd. 1634.) A good example is Chang Hung in the late Ming: as I've shown in various writings, he devises unprecedented techniques for making his pictures approximate better what he sees (in a Gombrichian sense), but nobody notices, and he is ranked in the "competent class"--in effect as a mediocrity--by those who make the judgements.

So, one could write a detailed and interesting account of picturing after the Sung--Craig Clunas has done valuable work in that direction, and a book I'm working on right now attempts it for the 17th and 18th centuries. But one can't write a history. The kind of development in portraying the visible world that exhibits some degree of continuity and a seeming logic ends with the end of Sung, and nothing comparable to the stylistic sequence we can trace, for instance, from 10th century landscape to Fan K'uan to Li T'ang to Ma-Hsia and Ma Lin will ever happen again.

Now, returning to what is customarily taken as the main line, literati and quasi-literati painting of the post-Sung period: the same is true here--it doesn't have a history, in the sense of presenting a succession of works susceptible to analysis as revealing intelligible patterns of change over long stretches of time. (I say this as someone who has published three volumes of what was announced as a "history of later Chinese painting"--the word was used loosely.) So what shape can it be said to take? Since a chronological account is obviously not to the point, I will let it take its form from its subject, and offer a series of related but discontinuous observations.

S,S. (Tai Chin, Shen Chou) The developmental thrust that was the motor for stylistic change in the earlier centuries of painting, and that allows us to speak of a history and a tradition, is lost. If we draw a time-line through the centuries that follow, we cannot arrange along it a succession of representative and interrelated works that exhibit a sequential order, but can only add extrusions sideward, so to speak--relatively short-lived schools and episodes that are not strung together into continuities. The Wu school, the Che school, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and his Orthodox school following, are prominent examples, but there are many others, mini-traditions which quickly lose their viability. School styles, often regional, can be defined among these, and period characteristics can sometimes be recognized that cut across schools--for instance, compositional method in the Wu school and Che school of the 15th-16th centuries. (Show: pictures composed of large, flat, firmly-bounded units that fit together or overlap without allowing real depth.) But these also do not succeed one another in any pattern of continuity. The appearance of those great creative masters who work from the mid-17th century into the early 18th "shakes up" these mini-traditions and gives them honorable ends. What follows has even less of impetus. The deaths of three major early Ch'ing landscapists within a decade--Shih-t'ao in 1707, Wang Yüan-ch'i in 1715, Wang Hui in 1717--marks, I have argued, a turning point in Chinese painting, of which the sharp decline in the production and importance of landscape is only one symptomatic aspect.[14] The Yangchou school in the 18th century, the Shanghai school in the 19th, the kuo-hua or "traditional" masters in the 20th, all can be said to make up a kind of post-post-history of Chinese painting that moves as if inexorably into the kind of "ongoing, potentially endless 'end-game'" condition that James Elkins (of whom more in a moment) sees in both late Chinese painting and our own art of recent times. If the collective project for artists of the firfst grfeat phase was exploring moades and techniques of representation, and for those of the second, working through the formal and expressive possibilities opened by the Yuan masters in their manipulations of old and new styles, the artists of the third, post-post-historical phase seem to have had no collective project at all--no agreed-on "great game" to play.

Such a schematic account gives no clue to why and how Chinese painting continued in such strength for more than four centuries after it had stopped "developing." The question is of some importance if we choose, in spite of all the attendant perils and with no intent of either prognosticating or admonishing, to consider later Chinese painting as an indication of the directions that a strong artistic tradition might take in the centuries after its developmental phase ends--in the words of the original title of an essay by James Elkins, "Chinese Landscape Painting as Object Lesson." And later Chinese painting is the only other case of this in the history of art, I believe, and so offers the only opportunity to make such a comparative inquiry (at considerable risk, as Elkins learned: after his original essay was rejected by several publishers and journals, he rewrote it with heavy injections of post-colonial theory and agonizing over whether such comparisons can ever escape bias--arguments in which, he told me, he didn't entirely believe; but it was still turned down, and remains unpublished.) To put the question another way: what were the patterns of relationships among the works constituting post-Sung Chinese painting that replaced developmental stylistic sequences in generating rich internal structures of meaning, and staved off, for several centuries at least, the disintegration and decline and repetitiveness that might have ensued?

S,S. (Detail of Hsiao-Hsiang, sec'n of Hsia Kuei.) To understand the significance of the radical break with the immediate past in the early Yuan period we should look briefly at what preceded it, the Southern Sung. If we were to single out the most consequential representational advance made in that period, it would be the shift to a more optical mode in which a grove of trees, for instance, is presented as the eye perceives it, fused into a single image, instead of as an assemblage of discrete objects--exactly the change that Leonardo is credited with introducing to European painting three centuries later.[15] Equally momentous is the development and refinement of expressive means for arousing in the viewer highly focused poetic sensations through rigorous selection and arranging of pictorial materials. Hsia Kuei is the great master of the first,

S,S. both he and Ma Yuan of the second, along with Ma's son Ma Lin, in whose hands this poetic mode is brought to the edge of preciousness. (Identify.) I have always been fond of musical analogies, and have sometimes invoked, in talking of this aspect of late Sung painting, that moment in late 19th-early 20th century music when the expressive means for arousing nostalgic and otherwise pleasurable feelings poignantly in the listener have become so effective and so accessible as to virtually force some composers of the period that follows, notably Stravinsky, to reject them in favor of deliberate moves into harshness and dissonance, or into a referential mode that seems to revert to old, pre-Romantic styles.

S,S. Chao Meng-fu occupies a similar position in relation to late Sung painting. Two of his major artistic strategems provide models for all later artists. In one, represented by his 1295 "Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains," archaistic allusions to old styles are turned to the purpose of a very sophisticated primitivism that denies all the representational advances in landscape painting made during the Sung and confronts us with a deliberately spaceless, awkwardly scaled, graceless scene. The other, represented by his 1302 "Village by the Water," employs a strategem that we might term stylistic extremism: pushing to an extreme, far beyond what could be sustained in a properly pictorial approach, some feature of style--here, the elimination of color and washes and pictorial variety and solid substance so as to leave only an expanse of dry, crumbly brushwork that only minimally evokes the simple scenery.

S --. It would be difficult to find in world art, at so early a period, any comparably radical and complex stylistic moves that are more than sports, or dead-ends--that are followed up, that is, by whole new lines of pursuit that prove to be themselves productive and innovative.

I don't say "lines of development," for reasons suggested already. Instead of adopting his style initially from some close predecessor, as in a traditional art, the painter now has the option of looking back over centuries for what is attractive and useful to him.

-- S. (Chao Meng-fu could find sources for his dry-brush drawing in some mid-Sung literati paintings, such as this "Red Cliff" scroll by Ch'iao Chung-ch'ang.) But drawing on sources in the past also produces patterns over time, and permits us to make up what we might call, adopting a term from the 1962 book by George Kubler, "linked solutions" (although his term was meant to include properly developmental sequences along with other kinds.) Following through two of these series of linked solutions, or whatever we call them, will clarify this practice better than discussing it in words could do.

S,S. Chao Meng-fu's new mode of applying spare, dry-brush drawing to the most unexciting of scenery is taken up by major Yuan masters such as Huang Kung-wang and Ni Tsan. (sec'n of Huang's "Fu-ch'un Mts" scroll , 1348-50; Ni Tsan LS of 1368, Princeton.) What we observe in Yuan painting is the situation in which a succession of highly creative artists are throwing stylistic ideas back and forth, so to speak, each grasping quickly what the others have done and making some new and unexpected move outward from that point, in a very complex interaction over time that leaves simpler pictorial concerns far behind. Sometimes the back-and-forth appears to happen in rapid succession, as here; at other times it extends over centuries, with long periods of lull.

S --. Huang Kung-wang, in his masterwork "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains," employs the spare, dry-brush manner in building more complex, volumetric structures, without sacrificing the improvisatory-looking drawing and rich brushwork textures that make his landscape forms still appear natural and un-schematic.

-- S. Ni Tsan, inspired in some part by these structural innovations of Huang Kung-wang, explores ways in which the dry-line drawing can be used in defining readable masses that are put together out of modular units of convex and semi-cubic forms. (A small painting dated 1352, present whereabouts unknown.) Ni Tsan writes modestly of his landscapes as "nothing more than a few random brushstrokes," but some of them, at least, prove to be carefully-made constructions of forms in space, not random at all.

S --. Shen Chou in the late 15th century is perhaps the next to follow this line of pursuit seriously, as in his "Walking with a Staff," ca. 1485 (which is based more, to be sure, on Ni Tsan's standard composition with near and far river shores and trees in the foreground.) But the next truly radical move within this series is made by

S --. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang in the early 17th century, the late Ming, as in this section of his "River Landscape After Huang Kung-wang" in the Cleveland Museum of Art. He credits Huang, in his inscription, as his model, and wishes that the old master could see his painting. Throughout the later phases of this series, it is as if the system of forms is being progressively stripped of its softening and naturalizing overlays of looser brushwork to reveal the stark underlying structure. And this process obviously implies an ever-increasing tolerance, or even preference, for unnaturalistic, all-but-abstract form.

-- S. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's radical reworking of the Yuan masters' styles was a principal model for the Anhui school in the early Ch'ing, along with the works of the Yuan masters themselves, as we can see in this 1659 work by the greatest of the Anhui artists, Hung-jen. Now even the schematic light-and-dark shading of Tung's style has disappeared, and the sense of substantiality, of three-dimensional mass, depends only on volume-defining devices of drawing possible within the linear manner.

S,S. The sequences are of course not really unilinear; the strands interweave, join and separate constantly. Hung-jen, in the mid-1650s, rediscovers the Northern Sung monumental landscape manner, and learns from it how to create effects of space and mass and towering height, as he demonstrates on a sublime level in his great "Sound of Autumn" in the Honolulu Academy of Arts. How the compositional devices used in this work derive from Northern Sung monumental landscape (such as this painting by Yen Wen-kuei) I traced in my 1982 Compelling Image book. The achievements of the later Chinese artists can often be described in terms of reconciling seemingly incompatible choices, and more specifically, as following up some stylistic direction into the range of extremism without reducing the power of the picture as an image. It is as if Hung-jen were demonstrating the possibility of staying within the dry linear manner and still creating landscapes that have the old qualities of spaciousness and monumentality.

S,S. (detail of Hung-jen, then his LS of 9 Bends River) I went on to show how what may have been an unintentional formal anomaly (etc., show)

This single sequence--and we could put together many others--will suggest the complex interrelationships that can be traced within a series of linked solutions, and also may suggest why I respond with exasperation when another western art critic puts down post-Sung Chinese painting for its failure to develop. Yes, it fails to develop, in much the same way that European painting from the mid-19th century on fails to develop, in the old and traditional sense. If that's taken to be sufficient grounds for dismissing the one, it's also grounds for dismissing the other. As I don't think we are about to do. Chinese painting of the centuries corresponding to Giotto-to-Gauguin in Europe didn't somehow miss the chance to make comparable representational advances; it was no longer concerned with making them.

S --. We return to the Yuan period to begin another of our non-developmental sequences, while also illustrating again the strategem of stylistic extremism. The landscape paintings by Ni Tsan's friend and contemporary Wang Meng, who was a grandson of Chao Meng-fu, stand at an opposite pole from Ni Tsan's in a number of ways, as this one exemplifies: "Forest Grottos at Chü-ch'ü"--fully packed instead of empty, highly unstable instead of stable, textures rich to the point of oppressiveness, near-incoherence instead of clarity, heavy color, active figures (at least seven of them in this picture)--and so forth. How the subjects and styles of Wang's landscapes seem to correlate with his political stance, as Ni Tsan's do with his, is a problem beyond this lecture. I introduce this late work by Wang Meng only as preface to

S,S. his masterwork of 1366, "Dwelling in the Ch'ing-pien Mountains." To put the matter briefly: Wang embodies in it his deeply disturbed response to the turmoil accompanying the Yuan-Ming dynastic change by representing his family retreat at Mt. Ch'ing-pien (in a region that was just then engulfed in warfare), employing a compositional formula that normally expressed a sense of security and escape from the outside world, but powerfully subverting the normal implications of this landscape type. The picture follows classical models in early landscape--Tung Yüan, Kuo Hsi, others--that had presented intelligible, accessible worlds. But Wang Meng's picture, while echoing the formulae that encouraged that kind of reading, doesn't permit the viewer to move easily through it, to find his way into and out of the retreat; it's full of spatial and formal ambiguities, blocked passages, unnatural and disorienting shifts of light and dark.

S --. In the upper part (one reads such a landscape upward), the animated earth masses and warped, constricted spaces between them do strange and powerful things to one's vision as one attempts to understand the picture in the old, naturalistic way. Recent Western art, of course, offer parallels for such sophisticated and radical violation of established expectations. But it is a strategem that works only so long as the expectations hold--when they have been violated too repeatedly, it loses its power.

S --. Skipping over the early and middle Ming imitations of Wang Meng's style by Shen Chou and others, I'll jump to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, whose own huge 1617 painting of the Ch'ing-pien Mountains, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, betrays a familiarity with Wang Meng's work, and probably one by Chao Meng-fu of the same subject, now lost. The points of correspondence will be obvious, as well as the great differences; Wang Meng's "Ch'ing-pien" and others like it are the genesis (along with their own predecessors) for a whole series of tall, crowded compositions in which the earth masses are made to generate more turbulence than the frame seems able to contain.

-- S. Tung's inscription on the work, however, doesn't mention Wang Meng's or Chao Meng-fu's pictures (he does that in another, recorded inscription); instead, he claims as his point of departure the style of the 10th century landscapist Tung Yuan. This is a copy of a painting Tung believed to be (as his inscription on it states) a genuine work of Tung Yuan, and of "divine quality." It is clear that Tung Ch'i-ch'ang grasped, and situated himself in, the linked series from Tung Yuan to Chao Meng-fu to Wang Meng to himself, with each earlier stage containing in more moderate form the features that the later ones would manipulate more radically.

-- S. (Pa-ta Shan-jen, Akaba LS) Each artist recognizes certain formal possibilities in the earlier painting that he can exploit to powerful effect in his own, and each artist in the series must have felt that he was pushing the implications of the style and imagery out to the furthest point possible--as indeed he was, for his time. What could possibly be done within this sequence beyond Tung's painting was in 1617 unimaginable; what in the event was done, we can see in this landscape painted in 1694 by Chu Ta or Pa-ta Shan-jen. (I mean, of course, one of the realizations of what was in effect an infinite range of possibilities--no kind of determinism is implied. Nor am I suggesting that this artist necessarily saw that picture.) (On to describe the picture.)

S,S. Returning briefly to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang: however one understands the process by which he arrived at the point of doing such paintings as these (here, a handscroll of ca. 1605), a problem that is of the same order of complexity and interest as tracing "the roots of Cubism", it can only have been through brilliant and sometimes violent manipulation of materials and "stylistic ideas" from earlier painting, in which layers of conventionalization, overlaid onto what was once imagery from nature--for instance, patches of fog against a mountainside--are transmuted into forms that are self-consciously bizarre and highly unnatural, but expressively powerful. The periodic attempts by some writers to "rescue" Tung from the stigma of being estranged from nature, on the grounds that great painters in China can only learn directly from their experience of real scenery (a cultural stereotype), represents, I continue to believe, a profound misunderstanding of what he is up to.

(Following paragraph deleted in lecture as delivered (lack of time):

S,S. In a lecture given at the Met some years ago, after the great international symposium on Tung Ch'i-ch'ang in Kansas City, I attempted this kind of multi-layered analysis of Tung's "Poetic Feeling at the Ch'i-hsia Temple" of 1626, which is the work I chose to represent him in the Guggenheim exhibition. Again, I cannot repeat the exercise here, and will only say once more that much of the richness of such a painting lies in the multiple readings it allows--one of which, to be sure, sets it in a relationship, however tenuous, to the actual place it purports to represent, a mountain near Nanking on which a famous Buddhist monastery is located. (The same mountain and monastery represented in Chang Hung's painting seen earlier.) More to the point, however, are Tung's attempts to recapture the styles of early masters, particularly Wang Wei--or, more properly, to demonstrate in highly schematic or diagrammatic form his understanding of them. That his understanding was based largely on earlier attempts to re-create these styles, by artists (and forgers) who knew no more about the real Wang Wei than he himself did, doesn't in any way debase Tung's achievement. A series of stylistically linked works need not include only good or genuine paintings; they frequently offer examples--and the history of art is full of them--of how good or even great art can be based on mediocre or bad.

S,S. (Chao Meng-fu "Mind Landscape," Fa Jo-chen.) Another important element in the complex of meanings that later Chinese paintings can carry lies in the way their subjects and styles can indicate the status of the artist and his stance on matters of politics and loyalism, besides embodying the message that he wants to convey to his intended audience, or that they may want to convey to some third party, as when they commission a painting to present to someone else on a particular occasion. Chao Meng-fu's "Mind Landscape of Hsieh Yu-yü" has been studied in an excellent essay (and dissertation) by Shih Shou-ch'ien; Fa Jo-chen's rainy landscapes and their political implications were studied in a paper of my own presented at a 1987 symposium and still unpublished. Both use established pictorial rhetoric to argue for the ethical rightness of serving under an alien regime that has recently replaced a native Chinese one, a choice that put them at risk of being branded turncoats: Chao Meng-fu held office under the first Mongol emperor, Fa Jo-chen under the first Manchu ruler. Both pictures and others like them were probably intended not merely to convey the artist's feelings about his situation but, more importantly, to strengthen bonds of like-mindedness with others in that situation.

S,S. Shih-t'ao, 1680s; Freer Wang Yüan-ch'i, 1706.) The German scholar Werner Speiser pointed out long ago that among landscapists of the Ming-Qing transition, those who became i-min or loyalists and kept aloof from the Manchu regime were likely to take the Individualist direction as painters, while those engaged in government service and a more conformist stance in society were more inclined toward the Orthodox school as landscapists. (Both groupings are, I believe, valid in that they are based on definable criteria of style.) This correlation may seem on the face of it so "right" or "natural" as to not need elaboration, but it also sheds some light on larger issues, such as why the Manchu rulers promoted the Orthodox style of landscape in their courts as a legitimizing move. Once we have established the correlations, that is, we can then go on to develop in fruitful ways their significance both within painting and outside it. Studies in this direction over the past decades have opened up important possibilities for better integrating Ming-Qing painting into the broader fabric of Chinese political and cultural history.

S,S. (Wu Wei, sec'n of "Myriad Miles of Yangtze River"; Wen Cheng-ming, 1535 LS after WM.) Similarly, mid-Ming artists, as I have shown in writings over the years, developed styles and chose subjects that seemed to themselves and their contemporaries to be somehow suited to their situations in life. Those, for instance, who were urged into the painting profession by failures to achieve governmental posts, and who wanted to escape being classed with the "artisan painters," manifested their non-conformism both their eccentric behavior and in their rough-brush or running-brush pictures. All this, again, is familiar; my point is that the rich and multi-dimensional system of signs and signification underlying Ming-Ch'ing painting permitted the artists to do works that not only were appropriate for a diversity of occasions and messages and uses, but could also, in their capacity as carriers of meaning, participate in negotiating issues of economic and social class, religious and intellectual beliefs, regional pride, and others that occupied people of the time.

S,S. (Ni Tsan, Hung-jen.) And the artists did this, I want to stress again, by drawing skillfully on an established system of signifiers. Ni Tsan's dry, sparse style is customarily read as reflecting or expressing his high-mindedness, reserved temperament, and obsession with cleanliness. Without disputing that reading, which has its measure of validity, one can point out that when this same style is taken up by a whole school of painters in 17th-century Anhui, the self-expressive account of painting breaks down, since it would confront us with a movement made up exclusively of high-minded, temperamentally reserved, obsessively cleanly artists. Instead, we understand the paintings in relation to a new clientele who wanted to claim these same qualities for themselves, and artists who understood their desires and were willing to accomodate them. The ownership of a painting by Ni Tsan or by Hung-jen, according to writers of their respective periods, conferred an elevated status on families in their regions. (This is a bare statement of a complex argument made by my students and myself in the catalog of a 1981 exhibition of Anhui-school painting.)

S,S. (Tung C-c, 1597 "Wan-luan Thatched Studio"; Ch'en H-s Self-portrait in LS, 1635.) It's not necessary to add, I hope, that none of these ways of reading the work exhausts its content, or dissolves the artist entirely into a nexus of status and circumstance. In branding as inadequate the traditional Chinese version of expressionist theory, I am certainly not rejecting altogether linkages between the art work and the psychology of the artist, as they are argued notably by Richard Wollheim.[16] After we have recognized that the paintings of these two late Ming giants (Tung Ch'i-ch'ang at left, Ch'en Hung-shou at right) in part reflect their respective positions as highly successful scholar-official (Tung) and failed-bureacrat professional painter (Ch'en), we must acknowledge that their bodies of work, both deeply engaged with old painting but in radically different ways, reflect also markedly different mentalities.

Tung in his theoretical writings, while never specifically rejecting the expressionist theory, sends it in a new direction, shifting emphasis away from the facture of the work, brushwork and texture and gesture, toward structural concerns that interlock with his modes of drawing on old masters. He rightly recognizes Chao Meng-fu as his true predecessor in this project, not merely for his advocacy of capturing the "spirit of antiquity" in paintings, but more, we can surmise, for making central to his work a deep sense of a plural past (I take the term from Carl Schorske, who writes of "cultural definition as modern through the ingestion of a plural past.")[17] Tung institutionalizes that practice and urges it on fellow artists, advising them on which veins in the past are most worth mining. He also makes a massive attempt to re-historicize Chinese painting with his theory of the Southern and Northern schools. This, as we all know, is a far cry from art history in our sense, but it was enormously influential, partly because it satisfied the deep Chinese need to invoke the cultural authority of the past in validating some doctrine and practice in the present. We may be reminded of Schorske's account of Wagner and William Morris as "drawing on the past in their constructions of modernity."[18] They, like Chao and Tung, "scrupulously avoided contemporary materials as subjects of their art"--both were disenchanted with the art of their time, both were "Revolutionaries in their aesthetic expression . . .[and] . . .conservatives in their search for spiritual anchorage." It was exactly this tension that misled even so brilliant an historian as Joseph Levenson, who, by understanding too literally Tung's claim to be imitating old masters, misread as a conservative painter one who was really a revolutionary.[19]

S,S. (Another of Ch'en's, Wu Pin.) If a systematic charting of the internal dynamics of a post-history can ever be accomplished, it will recognize that certain moves, certain strategies in engaging with the past, can be fully successful only once, or only for a brief time, and then lose their effectiveness. Wang Meng's way of working against expectations set up by earlier monumental landscape was essentially unrepeatable; when Wu Pin attempts something like it in the late Ming (a work by him dated 1615 on the left), the effect is undermined by the later artist's slipping into a mode of fantasy, which shifts the viewer's response from a quasi-real-world reading to one of estrangement. One is not invited to move in imagination through a Wu Pin landscape. Ch'en Hung-shou's very sophisticated misquotings of antique styles and imagery belong to a Stravinskian phase when irony can be a fresh and powerful artistic device. But this is another move that is essentially unrepeatable, although a few later masters such as Lo P'ing and Jen Hsiung revisit Ch'en's figure style effectively in certain of their works. Irony as a trenchantly pessimistic stance turns too quickly into one that is no more than easy parody, as all too much recent painting both inside and outside China demonstrates.

S,S. Our non-historical post-history of Chinese painting will conclude quickly, as this lecture must, with a highly abbreviated account of what happened (I stop short of saying went wrong) in the last three centuries, which I persist in seeing as a period of decline, in the face of all the recent efforts (on their own terms laudable) to present it as different but equal. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's model in re-introducing complex and innovative compositional structures to landscape painting and engaging productively with artists of the past remains in force only into the early 18th century, when the deaths of three major landscapists, as noted earlier, bring an end to this phase. Shih-t'ao's perception of fang, drawing on the old masters, as a practice more oppressive than enriching, and his late-period attempt to break out of it, powerfully but in the end poignantly, is symptomatic of the predicament of painting in his time, and does not point a way out. (A sec'n of his 1693 "Gazing at Hills in Yü-hang" and a detail.)

S,S. (late Orthodox LS: Wang Ch'en, 1773 & 1775.) For much of the landscape painting that follows, such words as "exhaustion" and "ennervation" seem applicable. In style, it tends to follow the Orthodox model without adding much to it; in subject, apart from some interesting pictures of real places, it tends to present endlessly, in a highly dilute form, the pastoral ideal of living in nature, far from the contaminating world. What had once been a moving theme has by now become outworn and tiresome.

S,S. (Ch'ing Academy works.) An extreme point in the draining of content from landscape imagery is represented by much of the production of the Ch'ing imperial academy (that part of it that aims at "painting" rather than "picturing), made up of tirelessly replicated Orthodox-style landscapes produced within the academy or the court by artists both Han Chinese and Manchu (the style was by now easily learnable) to be hung on palace walls. (T'ang Tai, 1721.) One suspects that as cultural signifiers empty of real content, such paintings seldom received more than brief glances. After visiting the restored rooms in the Palace in Beijing for the first time in 1973, I wrote to my students that paintings and calligraphy and objects had been reduced there to the status of Muzak environmental music: their presence gave a pervasive sense of luxury and cultivation without demanding any real aesthetic response. Noblemen who traveled could take with them portable connoisseurship kits with compartments containing miniature objets, including diminutive painting scrolls, to be taken out and "appreciated."[20]

S,S (Yangchou, Shanghai works: Lo P'ing 1799, Jen Hsiung 1856) The painters of the Yangchou school in the 18th century and the Shanghai school in the 19th, as well as kuo-hua or "traditional" artists in the 20th, produce paintings that are fresh, engaging, often loveable: I have written enthusiastically about them, and own and treasure examples of them. But artists of real originality appear more sparsely, and repetitiveness is more pervasive. Even such good recent painters as Ch'i Pai-shih and Huang Pin-hung slip into highly repetitive modes of production. Or, if not repetitive, the later images are likely to be thin in content and dilute in expression, in addition to taking a popularizing direction that robs them of some of the strengths of earlier painting.

S,S. Other subject categories supplant landscape in the late period, but these, too, one after another, succumb to conventionalization and make up new mini-orthodoxies. A genre of beautiful-women (mei-jen) pictures that flourishes in the 17th and 18th centuries, with an elaborate code of sexual invitation and a finely-tuned range of erotic charge from the demure to the lurid,

S,S. is tamed in the early 19th century into a more or less homogeneous and relatively pallid imagery of incorporeal, willowy ladies who smile sweetly and exhibit little strength or individuality.

S,S. (Last two slides, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and Shih-t'ao, shown not because I will say anything about them, but only to give a visual impression, at least, of a strong ending.) I could go on for a long time quoting Belting and Danto and others about our post-historical art and noting parallels with later Chinese painting. Someone could then ask: so what? and I would be hard put for a compelling answer. At this point I can admit with real honesty that I'm certainly not the person to venture any conclusions about what, if anything, the Chinese case might mean for the west in the 21st century and beyond. So I will conclude with a single observation. Chinese painting as I've tried to see it tonight continues strong for about four centuries after its history ends, sustained by a meaningful internal order that is not developmental but depends on strategies, worked out by the artists individually and collectively, of drawing on a plural past, whether distant or recent, and manipulating styles in very sophisticated ways. This period I've called post-historical, and what followed, characterized by the weakening of this internal order and the onset of disintegration and repetition, I've called post-post-historical. My comparativist observation would be that within this framework, if it has any validity, the post-history of western painting, which might correspond to what Belting calls the "classically modern," the phase of Impressionist/Post-Impressionist, Cézanne-to-Picasso-and-Cubism followed by a quick succession of other isms, was comparatively short-lived, and the post-post-history came on us depressingly soon. And before I'm tempted to expand on that observation, I will say: The end. Thank you very much.

Paragraph deleted from p. 10 (lack of time):

S,S. In the preface to a recent book by a colleague,[21] the idea that China had arrived, centuries sooner than the West, at a situation that has a lot in common with western modernism is called "one strand of the received wisdom" about Chinese painting," and the author goes on to separate himself from this argument, on grounds that he doesn't want to "position art in China as somehow 'really' winning the race to be 'modern' with that of Europe. . ." It's true that early in my career, in the 1950s, I went about giving lectures with titles like "The Contemporary Relevance of Later Chinese Painting." I was reading a lot of Harold Rosenberg and other critics of the time, and was excited over the ways in which some later Chinese paintings seemed to anticipate Abstract Expressionism, both in style and in theory: the idea that the brushstroke, as a record of movement, answered to the painter's nature and feeling, in ways that had little to do with the subject portrayed. (Sec 'n of handscroll representing grape vines by 16c master Hsü Wei.) But the point of my argument, whatever it was back then, certainly isn't now to show China as "winning the race"; it's rather to counter the belief still current among non-specialists in Chinese art that Chinese painting passed into state of stagnation after Sung, while European painting went on to great achievements we all know. This still seems worth doing. There were people who saw this as an empty exercise, since Chinese painting--or Asian art more generally-- was for them rooted in basically different cultural assumptions, ways of seeing and picturing. That disagreement still confronts us, and bedevils us, and won't easily be resolved. As today's lecture will reveal, I continue to believe that certain patterns and concepts and practices in art can properly be seen as recurring, loosely, across temporal and cultural boundaries, allowing us to observe them comparatively in their different contexts.

References in the text

[1]Max Loehr, "Phases and Content in Chinese Painting," in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Painting, Taipei, National Palace Museum, 1970, pp. 285-297.

[2]The Image and the Eye, p. 11.

[3]Painter's Practice p. 114.

[4]The Art of Describing, pp. 30, 83, 72.

[5]Images of the Mind, pp. 20-22.

[6]Cohen, Discovering History in China, 3rd ed.? px xiv (2nd pref., 1995)

[7]The End of the History of Art?, p. 41.

[8]Cf. the Yuan-period writer Yang Wei-chen in Hills, p. 165.

[9]Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 4-5, 12.

[10]Levenson, "The Amateur Ideal," and my "Style as Idea." Tung does, to be sure, write that the fang imitation that doesn't resemble its model is "the closest resemblance," and earlier artists had written that imitations of old paintings should not simply reproduce them; see my Distant Mts., pp. 120-123, "Fang or Creative Imitation: The Theory."

[11] Belting, p. 50, summarizing Rosenberg in The Anxious Object 25 ff., "Past and Possibility."

[12]Clunas, my own book-in-progress. I don't go as far as he in dissolving the 'discursive formation' (his term) "Chinese painting" (Pictures & Visuality in Early Modern China, Princeton, 1997, p. 15.. . but ...

[13]Cited in my essay "Types of Artist-Patron Transactions in Chinese Painting," in Chu-tsing Li, ed., Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting, Seattle, U.Wash.Press, 1989, pp. 7-8.

[14]My "Transitions & Turning Points" article.

[15]James Ackerman, "Leonardo da Vinci: Art in Science," Daedalus, Winter 1998, 223-4.

[16]E.g. The Art of Painting p. 138: "emotion, aroused by what we see, comes to color our perception of what we see." Very dif. from Chinese version of self-expression through brushwork.

[17]Thinking with History, p. 117.

[18]Ibid. pp. 90 ff.

[19]Levenson, "Amateur Ideal," and my "Style as Idea." My point about how art historians had failed to do their job--

[20]Some of these are reproduced in (ref.); they are discussed in Jan Stuart, "Life in the Imperial Court of Qing Dynasty China," in Proceedings of the Denver Museum of Natural History, Series 3, no. 19, Nov. 1, 1998, Chuimei Ho and Cheri A. Jones, ed., Life in the Imperial Court of Qing Dynasty China, pp. 55-67.

[21]Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, p. 10. Part of Clunas's purpose is to deny, rightly, that Chinese painting can be taken as unitary--or, less rightly in my view, to deny the validity of working with the concept of Chinese painting at all.

CLP 31: 1999 Discussant paper for session on "Visual Dimensions of Chinese Culture"

James Cahill's discussant paper for "Visual Dimensions of Chinese Culture" symposium, March 26, 1999

Both of these excellent papers fit very well the theme of this session, "Artistic Production in Practical Context," and in most respects offer model approaches to this problem, one that increasingly occupies both art historians and general historians. It is a relatively new direction of research, impeded as it was in earlier times by the well-known reluctance of traditional Chinese scholars and their latter-day followers to recognize that the creation of calligraphy and painting had any practical context at all. Studies pursuing this direction are thus necessarily revisionist, as are both these papers. Both show how "cultural capital" could be turned to political purpose, whether by an emperor or by a highly respected scholar-calligrapher.

Pat's paper, an excerpt from her book-in-progress, indicates the direction that her expected revisionism is going to take. Against the standard portrayal of Hui-tsung as a good painter and connoisseur but a weak emperor, an account that linked his failings as monarch with his fervor for aesthetic pursuits, she sees his multilevel engagement with art as in large part politically motivated, aimed at "making his court the cultural center of the realm." The thesis is generally convincing, at least to this reader. I especially admire her section on how Hui-tsung adapted his strategies to the changing conditions of the time, such as the spread of printing (pp. 23-24)--this is new and enlightening. For most of the paper, I could offer only small suggestions, such as the wisdom of distancing one's self a bit more from the claims made by the participants in the situation under scrutiny. For instance, instead of writing that we today can see Li Gonglin as "painting mostly for self-expression," it might be better to write that we can see him "as having claimed to paint mostly for self-expression"--the nature of his paintings, such as the scroll in Beijing with 1,286 horses and 143 horsemen, seems ill-matched to the idea of self-expression, which for him must have been more a matter of rhetoric than of real intent. And the suggestion in her Final Remarks that Hui-tsung's aesthetic bent and real love of the arts "do not mean that he was a romantic preoccupied with expressing his individual genius" may, I feel, be somewhat misleading--no one would argue that, and the deliberate impersonality of his style indicates that he wouldn't have either. That ideal belonged rather to the other camp, the literati artists, who claimed it for themselves even when (as with Li Gonglin) their paintings denied it. I would say that generally the distinctions in theory and taste and practice between Confucian literati and court, or outer and inner court, could be sharpened in some of the arguments.

When, for instance, toward the end of her paper, Pat credits Hui-tsung's "pushing his court painters to paint in a highly descriptive style, probably knowing such technical virtuosity was not easily matched by artists working outside the court" as one of his positive achievements, she does not take enough account, I would say, of the growing critical disfavor for this "highly descriptive style" outside the court. To write that he "rejected the distinction between court and literati culture implicit in much literati art criticism" again puts too positive a spin, perhaps, on what looks more like a defensive reaction of someone for whom old values seemed threatened.

Pat acknowledges (pp. 1-2), that the "amateur ideal" promoted by Su Shih and others "challenged court taste in painting" and calligraphy, then raises the question of how important these challenges were in weakening the cultural centrality of the court. Not so important, her answer would appear to be; very important, I would be more inclined to say, putting more weight, again, on the inner court- outer court distinction. The literati-court divergence in such basic matters as stylistic directions and criteria of evaluation may mark the first major bifurcation in the Chinese painting tradition, and was to prove decisive. But the question cannot be addressed effectively without attention to the paintings themselves. I will return to that point later.

Bai Qianshen's paper is an important addition to the growing body of studies that expose the realities often hidden behind the amateur ideal--since the ideal was more attractive and flattering to the artist, the realities remained invisible for centuries, until the taboo against looking at them was finally lifted (so recently that it's hard to recall the opposition one faced in writing about them, only a few years ago.) These realities include long, laborious work, sometimes supplemented by the employment of ghost painters or writers as aids in meeting the demand; pressures from people who could exact work from the artist without offering material recompense; compromises, sometimes indignities, as the literatus saw his status and talents turned into marketable commodities. Bai's presentation of Fu Shan brings out all these contradictions and dilemmas, but also Fu's success in exploiting the strengths of his cultural prominence.

Fascinating throughout the paper are the slippages between Fu Shan's writing as text, conveying messages to people through letters, and his writing as calligraphy, appreciated aesthetically by the recipients. This is seen most poignantly in a letter written by Fu Shan to an official ( p. 17), asking for his advice and support in a touchy matter, and asking him at the end to burn the letter after reading it. "Do not keep it. Be sure of that" he writes, but to no avail: the recipient, an admirer of Fu Shan's calligraphy, could not bring himself to destroy an example of it. Elsewhere (e.g. p. 18), letters from Fu Shan making requests that might well have been embarrassing to him are similarly preserved as his calligraphy. Bai Qianshen views this slippage positively, remarking that it has served to "preserv[e] an important historical document because of its calligraphic value." But what if the letter had really gotten Fu Shan into trouble? He might have wished he had had the letter copied by someone with a clumsy hand, and sent the copy.

Fascinating also are Bai's paragraphs (pp. 50-51) on the seemingly symbiotic relationships between Han Chinese serving as officials under the Manchus and the loyalists whom they supported, and who served as "symbolic resources" for them; and also his observation on Fu Shan's central role in the revival of chin-shih hsüeh or antiquarian-epigraphical studies.

Both papers, however, raise large issues which could only have been resolved, I think, by serious attention to the works of art, and which in the absence of that remain unresolved. For Bai Qianshen, it is the issue of quality in Fu Shan's calligraphy. Bai argues that his sloppy works were probably done for "vulgar people" and for recipients he did not care about. But when he writes of Fu's best works, those that represent his "highest achievement," these turn out to be (unless I misread him) works of xiaokai or small regular calligraphy. I wonder whether there is not a confusion here between value based on the the time and care required to produce them and real aesthetic value--no book or exhibition I can recall has chosen to represent Fu Shan with small regular calligraphy. (Fu Shan's own statements about
"smearing the silk" etc., as quoted by Bai, sound more like conventional modesty than a real opinion about his looser-style works.) But then, what are his best works? Those that best embody, I would assume, his individual style and the striking qualities sometimes perceived as eccentricity, while somehow negotiating successfully and even brilliantly between discipline and spontaneity--just as with Bada Shanren and Shitao and others. The works by him in the exhibition that will open tomorrow are described by Wen Fong as combining "standard, running, seal, and clerical elements in a wild-cursive style. . ." But in any case, this question, again, can't really be addressed except through close attention to particular works.

The direction in which my argument is tending will be obvious. The original statement of the goal of this project that we received from Pat Ebrey last fall said that she wanted to "push the encounter [between history and art history] in another direction by asking not what general history can contribute to art history, but what art history can contribute to general history." That was a good statement, setting the tone for the rewarding sessions that have followed. But I would like to suggest adding a few words to it, so that it will read: what art history that is directly engaged with works of art (or, if you will, with objects of visual culture) can contribute to general history. In choosing the "visual dimensions" theme for this whole project, Pat and others surely meant more than using the eyes to read texts. But, I feel obliged to point out, not many signs of their having been used in other ways can be found in these papers. Bai Qianshen does, to be sure, discuss briefly the influence of Yan Zhenqing on Fu Shan's calligraphy, and of Fu Shan's on Bai Tingshi's, referring to particular examples. And both paper-givers showed slides during their presentations, to illustrate their points. But this is a different matter from deriving some part of one's argument from the visual qualities of the objects.

If we art historians were to do a study or construct an argument built entirely on reading and interpreting the art objects, without reference to contextual matters accessible only through research in texts, we would be accused of formalism or an art-for-art's-sake approach or failure to contextualize or some other methodological misdemeanor. But when someone makes an art-historical argument without really engaging with particular works of art, what is the response? None, because it happens all the time. In a piece written years ago for a Joseph Levenson memorial volume I presented this problem, saying that, for instance, writing about Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's use of fang or creative imitation without showing how it works in actual paintings is like writing about metaphor in English poetry without showing how it works in particular poems--scarcely anyone would do the latter, everybody at that time was doing the former.

It must be acknowledged, of course, that these two papers are drawn from larger, continuing studies of their subjects, Hui-tsung and Fu Shan; Pat's will surely become a book, and I assume that Bai Qianshen's will also, on the basis of his Yale dissertation and later writings. And I assume that both will use readings and analyses of paintings and calligraphy to good effect in those larger studies. It could be said, moreover, that readings of particular works was not to the present purpose for either of them in writing these two papers. I would suggest nonetheless that doing so would have enriched the papers significantly, supporting or amending their arguments--giving them, so to speak, a visual dimension.

Pat writes about ptgs by scholar-official literati on the one hand and by members of the Song imperial family (including members by marriage such as Wang Shen) on the other as though they were more or less interchangeable. But close attention to the surviving paintings by members of the two groups would have permitted her to observe, I believe, that they are likely to differ in fundamental, definable ways--Su Tung-p'o and Hui-tsung could not, that is, have changed places and painted each other's pictures. In stating the matter that way I echo a paper of my own, given in 197?, in which I demonstrated a firm correlation between the life-patterns and the paintings of mid-Ming artists: those belonging to one socio-economic type painted pictures of one kind, those of another type painted pictures of another kind. T'ang Yin and Wen Cheng-ming could not paint each other's pictures. The implications of that correlation still trouble some specialists in the field, but no one has been able to shake the correlation. Perhaps the pattern would not be quite so neat for late Northern Song literati officials and imperial relatives, but it is clearly observable, and recognizing it might have pushed Pat's discussion of this matter in a somewhat different direction.

Near the end of her paper (p. 22), Pat notes in defense of her dependence on words more than on objects that we have only a tiny proportion of the actual objects that figure in her discussion, and that "it is difficult to force those that do survive to talk to us." Difficult, perhaps, but by no means impossible: it is exactly what good art historians do all the time. As a single example, Peter Sturman's paper on the "Cranes Above Kaifeng" painting makes it speak eloquently, delivering, among other things, a political message; and that is only one example of many. (Not enough, but many.) The methods of reading and interpreting visual materials in ways beneficial to one's work can be learned, if one takes the time and trouble, just as one can learn to read and interpret texts, including those in foreign languages. Art historians are properly expected to spend the time and trouble to master the latter, and other kinds of historians, if they are going to use the visual materials effectively, can properly be expected to master the former. I am of course questioning only Pat's statement of the matter, certainly not her ability to deal expertly with visual materials, which has already been amply demonstrated and will be again, we can be sure, in her book. And the same is true of Bai Qianshen's paper: that he did not choose to treat Fu Shan's calligraphy in visual terms on this occasion does not call into question his ability to do so on a high level. I will look forward to both books, and will enjoy especially those passages in which the authors explore, illuminatingly and in a true sense, the visual dimensions of their subjects.